What you're doing is assuming "the relevant market" is very narrow. In antitrust law, they say the case is won or lost on how broadly the relevant market is defined. Does Amazon compete against every brick and mortar store, or just other online merchants? The subsequent legal analysis looks very different depending on the answer to that question.
Most people who dislike Apple have already found themselves a nice Android phone on it for less money with several app stores.
This goes both ways. My corner bodega has a monopoly over its intersection.
In practice, we need legislation defining anti-competitive behavior for platforms and Thompsonian aggregators [1]. I haven't seen anyone propose a sensible, predictable framework.
Skimmed an interview Doctorow gave for Time [1]. I get the gripe. But I’m failing to find a unique, actionable definition.
Better concise source?
[1] https://time.com/6219423/chokepoint-capitalism-doctorow-gibl...
> You've probably heard about the pathetic sums that creators earn from Spotify streaming, often blamed on the tech industry's unwillingness to pay creators what they're worth. Maybe you've also heard the rebuttal – that Spotify pays plenty to entertainment companies, but they intercept this money before it can get into creators' pockets.
> That right there is the false binary – either Spotify is cheap, or the Big Three record labels are greedy. But what if – and hear me out here – Spotify is cheap and the Big Three are greedy? What if Spotify and the labels are actually colluding to rip off the "talent"? What if neither kind of monopolist is good for artists, and no matter how much we love them, they'll never truly love us back?
The search results are filled with adverts for Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow's book, but Cory Doctorow hasn't tagged many of those adverts "chokepoint capitalism": his website lists examples, instead. https://pluralistic.net/tag/chokepoint-capitalism/
Summarising https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/, I'd define it something like:
> Chokepoint capitalism is where one party becomes both a monopoly and a monopsony: a gatekeeper, or "chokepoint". This gives it more leverage than any single other party, which it uses to extract and exploit with impunity. ⸻ While it may once have added value, once an entity becomes a chokepoint, it can cease to add value, and even start making people's lives actively worse ("enshittification"), without losing its position of power.
I agree with all the examples. I just struggle to see a framework. How has he defined the monopoly? That’s what we are looking for. A new definition for antitrust, ideally separate from the definition of monopoly and its market-definition magic variable.
Say one buyer/seller with 51+% of a market by unit or revenue would be subject to anti-trust scrutiny. Perhaps another tier requiring more drastic measures, such as breaking them up.
And they know it's wrong. How do you suggest we compel good behavior?
Leverage isn't about "the market", either. It's about the individual people, and their situations. The iOS App Store doesn't give Apple much leverage over iPhone users, but iCloud does – and, to a lesser extent, iMessage¹ and FaceTime do. (The flipside of the iPhone's many planned obsolescence strategies is that you have to choose whether to remain within Apple's ecosystem every three-to-five years, and iPhones are expensive.)
The iOS App Store does give Apple significant power over the authors of apps. Even if the App Store doesn't provide a chokepoint by itself, the iPhone “ecosystem” as a whole does. It's a different thing to antitrust, though the more egregious offenders might also constitute monopolies for antitrust purposes.
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¹: Perhaps relevant to the Y Combinator gang: https://www.cultofmac.com/743055/why-it-pays-for-startup-fou... https://www.androidauthority.com/google-green-bubble-intervi...
On Cory Doctorow's "competitive compatibility" / "adversarial interoperability" theme, a company called Sunbird Messaging claims to have made an iMessage clone for Android. It's proprietary, and might turn out to be vapourware, but I'm hopeful.
BTW, Spotify pays 70% of its revenue to copyright holders. How much more does he want Spotify to pay? Note: it's 70% of revenue, not profit.
> Documenting the group’s last show before the coronavirus hit, the pay-what-you-want release generated $4,200 from nearly 700 buyers in just two days. That’s more than 75 Dollar Bill have made through streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube over the last six years. “Streaming is a joke,” Chen tells me. “We might make $100 a year from streaming. On a recent statement of mine, the royalties for one track that had 580 plays on Spotify was zero dollars and 20 cents.”
This article goes into some detail about reasons: https://pirate.com/en/blog/can-bandcamp-compete-with-spotify...
> Unlike Bandcamp, Spotify’s royalty rate is difficult to ascertain, using a model which pays royalties based on the number of artist streams as a proportion of total songs streamed – which benefits the Ed Sheerans and Taylor Swifts of the world far more than it does any struggling artist or independent creator.
> Per stream royalty rates on the platform have been gradually declining for years. One recent estimate suggested the figure averaged around $.00348 per stream, or $3,300 – $3,500 per million plays.
If anyone can explain that "the pricing model disproportionately rewards established artists" claim to me, I'd appreciate it. I've heard that claim a lot, but I don't really understand how the pricing model is bad. (It feels like the kind of pricing model that admits sleight-of-hand, but that's all.)
> explain that "the pricing model disproportionately rewards established artists" claim to me
It's not uncommon, especially in scenarios where distributors can strongarm artists into signing their agreements. In the world of gaming, progressive distribution models are very common, where Steam/Epic/Sony takes a smaller cut as you get sell more units.
The unfortunate fact is that boiling down digital music sales gets you two things - file distribution and payment processing. And the payment processing costs money.
Within the last few years, I've noticed a trend where questions are now interpreted as statements. I can't say I understand it. I don't think it's fair to say they were assuming anything. They were asking for help in understanding.
The second part of the question is assumed. To question that part, one would ask "how can the app store promote competition if it is a monopoly on iOS?"
I thought the question was not entirely in good faith, since it would be pretty obvious that there's no such thing as "monopoly on X" — otherwise it would make Sony a monopolist on Playstation, Microsoft a monopolist on XBox, etc.