>
https://casetext.com/case/metzler-v-bear-automotive-service-...That is a district court case with no value as precedent.
And in that case, like most of the others regarding aftermarkets, the monopoly in the aftermarket is obtained merely by refusing to sell OEM parts (and thereby monopolizing the repair market). Apple isn't refusing to sell OEM screens and batteries -- I mean they are, but that isn't what we're talking about today -- they're using technological measures to purposefully exclude competitors for app distribution. That's a lot more brazenly anti-competitive than merely not selling parts and service independently.
It's also questionable whether you can really get away with calling the entire software market an "aftermarket" of the device market. It's like claiming that online retail is an "aftermarket" of the real estate market because the goods get shipped there. That's not exactly the same thing as the "aftermarket" for copier service, is it? It claims too much.
> https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/attachments/us-submissions-...
This is, similarly, predominantly an analysis of lower appellate court cases narrowing the Supreme Court's Kodak decision. The one you're quoting from is a 1st Circuit decision, whereas the case Epic filed is under the 9th Circuit.
And this is from your link, Page 6 of the FTC paper:
> 13. In the context of aftermarkets, a key question regarding product market definition is whether the aftermarket constitutes a relevant product market separate from the foremarket. The hypothetical monopolist test can answer this question—if a profit-maximizing hypothetical monopolist of an aftermarket (that is not a monopolist in the foremarket) would raise prices by at least a small but significant and non-transitory amount, then foremarket competition is not sufficient to prevent against anticompetitive behavior in the aftermarket; thus it is appropriate to analyze competition in a separate relevant market comprising the aftermarket.
If there was any doubt that this is true for the app store market, wasn't this the very thing Epic went out of their way to empirically prove? Epic is willing to charge less than 30% to distribute apps, and thereby charge lower prices to consumers. If the hypothetical monopolist in the "aftermarket" couldn't have charged more than Epic without hurting their sales in the primary market then how is Apple actually doing that? The claim that they would be making up for it by charging less for the product in the "foremarket" would require them to actually be doing so -- does Apple charge less for its phones than its competitors? (No.)
Likewise:
> Even where the original equipment market is a monopoly, however, if buyers understand that they are locked in (hence vulnerable to hold up), there will be no additional harm from hold up in the aftermarket–the monopolist cannot charge more in total than the buyer’s reservation price for the services generated by the equipment over its lifetime.
This falls apart for the app store market because it's a market like web hosting where there are customers on both sides -- the person buying "hosting" might also be selling something, but they're still a customer. So to avoid the market effects that are supposed to be constraining them, they only need to charge the fee to the developers who don't get to choose which phone their own customers have.
And then that's in fact what they do -- it's the developers who pay the 30%, and they're even prohibited from providing the equivalent discount when the product is purchased from competing channels that charge less, so the phone customer can't choose a different phone that has cheaper apps or in-app purchases, because the developers aren't allowed to provide the discount.