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Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

"Their platform, their rules" – there are many people who say this, especially on HN.

If only the refrain was "EU's territory, EU's rules". No platform can operate in isolation from the laws of the places they wish to trade.

Because they're all trying to build platforms, probably

Are we doing “temporally embarrassed platformers” now

Aren't startups just temporarily embarrassed FTAANGs?

>> Because they're all trying to build platforms, probably

Or not building products which collide with platforms.

As a general rule, if you have to use offensive lawsuits you are not smart enough to do it cleanly.

This is true in business and everywhere else

The problem is not the rules themselves.

The rules applies to Spotify, but not to Apple music. Apple should make Apple music a separate entity, and make it pay 30%.

No company should have the power to tell another company that they must split up into separate entities.

Company? No. But a government can absolutely do this and it's a thing that happens all the time, even in the US.

No company, but the government should be able to

Apple has built itself up into a vertical monopoly, which used to be illegal. There is no good reason to allow anti-competitive behaviours. They shouldn't be allowed to host the platform and compete with applications at the same time.

And yet vertical integration is a big part of why Apple products are so loved. By denying the option of vertical integration, you’re forcing the totality of products we use to be incrementally a little bit more crap.

you can have vertical integration. But having an advantage at one layer should no be leveraged as advantage to another layer.

Apple is free to make a music player. But its music player should abide by the same rules as other players in the market.

Either Apple Music has its income cut by 30%, or no one does.

Personally I’d have no problem if Apple was forced to give all streaming music services like Spotify a sweetheart (below cost) percentage, say 5%, which wouldn’t cover the totality of merchant fees, gift voucher markups, and dealing with fraud.

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