But in this case, the town is not 90% of the geography. Last i heard Google's town is bigger and there is also RIM Town (mass exodus happening there), a new WP7 town (lots of airport signs) and a few others around.
If this doesn't feel like anticompetitive behaviour, I don't know what does. They are using their rather large position in the smartphone/tablet market to enter another market (in this case storage) and snuff out the competition. And there are other examples.
Be careful what you wish for. If antitrust laws can be applied even when there is no monopoly, indeed, not even a majority market share, you are basically giving the government a green light to do a WHOLE lot of bad things.
Now it's kind of funny to see some of the same people make the argument in comments here that Apple has no significant marketshare or dominance of anything.
Why is this a distinction?
Apple has a monopoly on the "market" (portion) that pays for apps. That's not as clean a definition of market as you would want. The defining characteristics of this market are also (arguably) inconveniently dependent on the offending practices. IE iphone user pay because it is easy, because there is a single payment provider, because users don't have to worry about a cheaper option some roundabout way, etc. etc.
Then there is the problem that any platform, regardless of overall marketshare is something like a little local monopoly. Our definitions of monopoly don't really work here but platforms can still exhibit a lot of what anti-monopoly rules are trying to prevent.
Apple are being abusive, few would deny this. Few have. Why are you?
A market segment just is a market according to the dictionary definitions. And legally, a lot of EU competition law concerns exactly how one individuates such markets/market segments.
Can you draw out what you're claiming more?
The fact remains semantically and legally that you a monopoly of the segment or niche of a market is not possible. A company can be abusive (which is what you mean when you say monopoly - something which in and of itself isn't illegal), but unless they control the significant majority of the whole the it is legally not an issue. Morally is different debate.
Well, I don't know what you mean by 'cogent', as that's generally taken to be a property of arguments and not statements (there may be loser notions, but as I say you'd need to spell out what one you intended). However, the statement that 'Apple have a monopoly over Apple products' is a true statement, which is all that matters to establish the semantic point. It might be trivial, but it's trivially true.
If I might try a helpful suggestion, it seems to me your confusion is arising because you're thinking something like 'if x is a market segment, then x isn't a market'. But of course that doesn't follow, as one can individuate markets at different levels (more or less fine grained).
Then there's a legal point about whether one opens oneself to legal action for dominance when operating in certain ways over market segments - I think it's also true you can be. But I'm not that advanced in my legal training, so don't take a strong position on that.
Further, there are normative and moral issues about what should be the law, and what one should do in these cases - but discussing those would take a long time...
The issue here is one of sensationalism. As a community, we a far too quick to jump to the "$corp is evil!" conclusion without looking for a reason, however ridiculous it may seem. We, as a community, are too cynical for own good.
> "Apple makes 80% of the money in the cell phone market, Apple is the only one making any money"
Making the majority of the profits is not a monopoly in the Microsoft Windows sense, which I assume is what we're talking about here. iOS does not have that in the handset market (esp. if you include Symbian!), and the tablet market is very young.