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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

If you’re steering a platform, you want people to use your APIs and tools. I don’t see how that’s controversial. Otherwise, what are you even doing?

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It's not about using their APIs and tools. It's about banning competition. That is beyond controversial - it should be illegal.

What they should be doing? Competing on merit. Not pushing lock-in.

You were specifically disdaining Apple’s push to APIs and tools adoption:

“What a horror - someone won't be using Apple APIs and tools.”

Allowing third party also circumnavigates Apple's approval process.

Personally I don't care about giving up choice if it means reduction of spam.

On a similar note, I'm happy Reddit is reducing third party apps.

Prevents spammy reddit apps.

spammy reddit apps?

It's illegal when a company has a monopoly, but otherwise that's the nature of business. The line of thought that 'apple has a monopoly in iPhone software distribution' never seemed very compelling to me since they don't have a monopoly on mobile phones in general.

You are using term "monopoly" in a misleading way there. It should be illegal when it's causing harm to competition and it totally does. It doesn't need to be an absolute monopoly to be a problem. The fact that competition law is toothless today to address it speaks badly about how it's applied, not about this being a non issue.

Apple has enough control on the market to cause harm to it by stiffing Web standards for example without being an absolute monopoly.

> It should be illegal when it's causing harm to competition and it totally does

Banning being mean to your competition, that's a first.

Read what competition law is about. It's not simply about absolute monopoly which is an extreme edge case. It's about harm to competition. Anti-competitive practices totally should be illegal.

> Read what competition law is about

> Anti-competitive practices totally should be illegal

So are there competition laws that make it illegal, or do you wish there were? Are you asking for enforcement? Or are you just hoping for change?

Concepts in current competition law are good enough already. Its enforcement is toothless though. So yeah, I'm asking for enforcement.

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