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Comment by Aldo_MX | Hacker News Reader

It won't end, Apple is too big now, the alternatives are:

  1. Split Apple into smaller companies
  2. Operate Apple like an utility company

They did this to themselves, and it's only downhill from this point.

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> Split Apple into smaller companies

Curious, how would you split them up? A lot of their stuff is very intertwined, I guess Beats, Shazam are easy to split into their own, but the rest?

My expectation is that a government would do an investigation first, but I believe that a split would look like this:

  - The computing hardware company
  - The accessory hardware company
  - The operating system company
  - The software company
  - The cloud services company
  - The app store company
  - The music & video company
  - The messaging company

So yeah, a split looks scary.

For starters, it's Apple the phone making company, Apple the software making company and Apple the (software) distribution company. The cloud, the payment processing, the bank whatever else is there.

They can still be quite integrated, they just have to a allow a different distribution company compete without using the phone company's monopoly as a leverage against them and not use distribution company as a leverage to compete with other software developers i.e. pay the same 30% fee, bid for promotion in the store and use fair ranking in the search.

It's not the first time a huge corp gets split up once they reach end game and can't innovate in their own field anymore.

> They did this to themselves

What...by being successful?

No, by being anti-competitive. Most countries have laws against monopolies, and it was naive to expect that countries would wait until you destroy the competition to enforce those laws.

> Most countries have laws against monopolies

They have less than 25% smartphone marketshare. What monopoly do they have?

They don't.

That's why the regulation targets "gatekeepers" with revenue in the billions and at least 45Million European users.

The EU decided that this is large enough to be limited in what they can do.

It is curious that there are no European gatekeepers either.

They do. That’s why the EC had to create a new class named “gatekeeper”: because Apple isn’t a monopolist.

That's what I meant. Sorry if it was unclear

Yes. It's the reality of capitalistic end game. You start with a great product, innovate for 30 years and then when you think you got it and can endlessly extract the rent from the market, while adding another megapixel and megaherz and buying out or bulling competitors, then the government knocks on your door and gives you the award of the biggest asshat in the town and asks to retire.

Congrats, you won, now let somebody else play the game and become a boring public utility. And by the way, your research lab is now a public university. And the taxes is what government does, not you.

> And the taxes is what government does, not you.

Because the role of the government (in theory) is to use these taxes for public utility services and projects. Companies only care about their owners and shareholders, a very small subset of the population. If you're not contributing to society, but just profiteering, you should retire. Especially if your position lead you to have a say to what succeed or not in the economy.

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