Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

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I mean there's nothing stopping me from creating a physical analog to this. I buy a space and set up stalls for businesses to set up shop. The conditions for being part of this market are:

* You have to use my payment system.

* I get 30% of your gross revenue.

* You have to follow my guidelines about what you can and can't sell and how you're allowed to sell it.

* You can't, while you're at the market, advertise how customers can reach you outside the market. I'm not about to just let you use my space as an advertising channel for free.

And in this hypothetical universe my customers love it! They do all their shopping here. I can both see how businesses that don't want to follow my rules would feel super frustrated but those rules are what makes my market worth coming to. My rules basically boil down to "fuck you pay me" and treat my customers well.

I buy a space and set up stalls for businesses to set up shop. The conditions for being part of this market are:

This exact thing exists. From bazaars to food courts to antiques centers. There are hundreds of thousands of these situations around the world.

But for some reason because "it's on the interwebs!" it's supposed to be magically different.

To have this analogy encompass the full situation, you're also a residential landlord who owns 50% of all residential housing in the US. Your tenants are only allowed to have things in their home that came from the market you control. Things bought in the market also cannot be placed in housing you do not control.

You argue you don't have a monopoly because your tenants can always move, even though most of their possessions cannot be moved to other housing.

Reasoning by analogy is bad, but I think it's important to note that most people's phones are their digital home. It is not a low friction situation to just "shop elsewhere" for a single product when it wouldn't be compatible with your home.

This is where I think the disconnect is. I see the entire iOS device as Apple's marketplace and so the housing analogy doesn't make sense to me. The app is your stall where you're allowed to sell things and conduct business.

I'm not saying it's low friction at all. Hell I would try to make my hypothetical market as high-friction as possible by having a prepaid high-cost membership fee, as many exclusives as I could find, and lots of benefits and services tied to it. This just seems like business.

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