Solution: create your own alternative to open market - be the market (and write rules for it)
Apple will do a lot to keep this cash cow at peak performance.
If something "has to be a monopoly", there is a good case to be made that you are talking about a core public infrastructure piece which shouldn't be under control of a singular private entity.
So you are talking about a technical solution to a social issue, that wont solve it.
With a common standard, the available of card-based payment providers would indeed increase. In europe, you often can't pay with Diner's Club or American Express. If they would not all have proprietary systems and were compatible, then their adoption would in-fact increase.
Naturally, not every grandmother and their dog should be able to use this standard but there must be a well-respected authority behind it. Taken to the extreme and we couldn't trust anybody we couldn't have root certificates.
Many countries have far more payment systems. For example, Japan, 7/11 takes Line Pay, PayPay, Merupay, au Pay, R Pay, d払い, Smart Code, J-Coin, Bank Pay, QOU-Pay, WeChat Pay, Alipay, Nanco, R Edy, iD, QUICPay, 9 different train cards, Mastercard, Visa, American Express, JBC.
Some of them you insert the card, some use NFC, some you scan a QR Code, some you show a QR code.
Some have had big discounts or "points", probably to try to get market share. The discounts can go either way. Some are for the consumer (get 5% cash back for example). Others are for the merchant (zero fees for N months, etc...)
There's tons of competition.
There was a time when common wisdom was that telephone companies and many other infrastructure businesses needed to “obviously” be monopolies as well (sometimes state-owned, sometimes private, which is arguably the worst of both worlds). I really wouldn’t want to go back to that.
The two cards are essentially interchangeable so it is a duopoly. And the fact that they are subject to constant regulatory scrutiny without adding laws to force new entrants is why it is such a good example, it shows how well regulations can work without adding competition. To me in Europe credit cards works really great with low fees and no fuzz, I don't think that anything needs to be done about that more than is already done.
To merchants, yes, since they can't reasonably only accept one but not the other, as that would turn away a large fraction of their customer base. This is why most regulatory action happens here.
> subject to constant regulatory scrutiny without adding laws to force new entrants
There are absolutely measures taken to encourage new market entrants or at least more competition among the existing ones. (Whether they are effective is a different question.)
As one example, in the US, every debit card issuer is obliged to add at least one other brand/network to their cards, so that merchants do in fact have some routing choice. In Europe, some countries also have a domestic competing debit scheme, such as CB in France, Girocard in Germany etc.
> I don't think that anything needs to be done about that more than is already done.
I think you underestimate how unstable the current equilibrium is. The interchange cap regulation is relatively new, and I doubt that the networks will fail to come up with other ways to grow their market share and/or revenue that will, at some point, require further regulatory scrutiny.
For banking transfers there's SEPA so assuming a similar system could be set up for credit cards.
I didn't say they encouraged it, just that they didn't end it but instead added laws to cap the fees.
HTML is a standard, not a monopoly
The job of the EU is protect and benefit the EU, not American companies. The DMA is not a “general” regulation like the GDPR that applies to all, this is a tailored approach to help EU companies.
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https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/commission-designat...
"Stay in our ecosystem or else your friends/family will stop including you in group chats, stop sharing pictures with you, stop sharing video moments with you"
Apple leverages your personal social connections against you in the US...and by and large people don't seem to know or really care.
The problem is if Apple's obstinance leads them to loosing much more of their cash cow than if they had just given up a little.
As they should. Innovators should be able to collect a profit for their hardwork. A decade later when your company gets captured by MBA grads it's not a great thing for the consumer or the economy as a whole if they just sit there and collect rent while lobbying for regulatory capture to keep any new talent from being able to do better than them.
Do you also think drug peddlers are smart for entering an under supplied market?
History tells us that the institutions with laws, guns, judges and a monopoly on violence rules over "smart people" who just make phones.
Apple's only retaliation is making life shit for EU users or pulling out of the EU market which they won't because that would leave a China style vacuum that Google or a local EU competitor will take after a period of painfull transition for the EU consumers.
The EU consumers can live without iPhones. Can Apple's shareholders live without Eu's profits?
That's quite a large loss. Esp. given that there's another option - stay on the EU market while conforming to its rules. That will lower the profits, but not by that much.
Losing Europe as a market would have larger consequences, though. Software produced in EU would have worse support on Apple, people even in US having connections with Europeans would start installing alternative messengers etc. Apple's strength is in its network effect, cutting out a major part of it would be disastrous.
Similarly, my experience is that software produced in the EU commonly has worse support on Apple, including at companies I worked for. Again, that's already the reality. This fact was sometimes raised as a reason the apps had difficulty getting traction in iPhone heavy markets like the US.
There are reasons for Apple to stay in Europe but these aren't the reasons. I've commonly observed that the iPhone is more of a status symbol in Europe than in the US (where it is usually just the phone most people buy by default), which creates different market dynamics. In the US good interoperability with other iPhones is more important because that is a primary reason people buy them.
Americans in Europe like you, or Americans in the US? Because for the latter, the statists would disagree, as in most use iPhones and just default to iMessage.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2024/03/more_on_the_eus_market_mi...
Indubitably it would hurt Apple a lot if they lost a quarter of their revenue, would it not?
So yeah, the EU is bound to be a big number but it isn’t 25%. The biggest economies in the EU are Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium? Big countries outside of it but included in Apple’s “Europe” catagory include the nordics, UK, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and probably something else.
Even if the EU makes up half of what Apple calls “Europe.” A fine of 10% of worldwide revenues is way beyond what the EU contributes to the bottom line. There’s no way Apple wants to take the nuclear option but if the EU threatens them with big enough fines they might think about it.
This one is a big stretch. Sweden, Denmark and Finland are part of the EU, while Norway and Iceland are part of the EEA where the DMA also applies.
Most people in Europe use Whatsapp or FB Messenger, so they don't need Facetime or Apple Messages - major selling points of the Apple ecosystem. Alongside that, only 6% of people in the EU use macs, which further shows how Apple's ecosystem does not have a solid foothold in the EU.
The real problem is that some of these mega-corporations can drag things out so long legally that the end result barely matters. :(
Government regulation are kind a opposite side of that coin.
It's not gaslighting. People work for the company, and they decided. You're dehumanising them by saying they aren't human.
I think you have an incorrect model of the incentive structure and actual power dynamics of publicly owned corporations.
Even the CEO has to answer to shareholders in the end.
And people who knowingly leverage their gigantic corporation to make life worse for others in the name of shareholder profit can and should be dehumanized. There nothing humane in hurting others for greed.
Like the local book club, or Hamas.
Anyway, you don't have to look very far to see the many horrible things done to humans by other humans.
The word "humane", in my view, defines how we would like to be, not how we really are.
The problem is considering "Apple" itself a person, as corporate personhood does. Thinking of companies, even in limited contexts, as a "person" allows the individuals actually making decisions to be largely immune from liability on a personal level. Maybe that should change.
Technically a person is just a bunch of cells, but those cells are interchangable, replaceable (indeed few last more than a couple of decades), and if you lose an individual cell nothing happens to the person, but the cell can’t function.
we don’t say the cells make decisions, we say people do. With a corporation it’s the corporation that makes the decisions, not the individual cells.
The population of a city or a nation is similarly greater than the sum of its parts, and there is an emergent property in both cases. Same as an ant colony.
2 things though.
The constituant parts of a corporation are human, unlike an ant colony. So in that sense they are human, and ant colonies are ant.
Regarding ourselves, we absolutely are an assembly of cells, it wouldn't be wrong to define us as such, although not terribly convenient. But interchangeable the cells are not, well not like a person to a corporation.
A cell can't move from one person to another, if it somehow disagreed with a decision of the central nervous system.
The human brain is made up of billions of cells, and decisions of the brain are heavily dictated by the digestive system and various hormones. A corporate board is at the most, what, maybe a few dozen people? There isn't the same level of responsibility of each component.
Finally, if the entire corporation decides as one entity, how to punish for wrongdoing?
Should every component of the corporation be put in jail if the corporation kills people (looking at you Boeing), or just the humans at the top that made those decisions?
Another way of looking at it: Is the entirety of the Palestinian population responsible for the decisions of the dozens of humans that are the Hamas leadership?
And hurting other for greed is surely not humane, but it is very much human. Big difference that e at the end.
- it is Apple vs EU
- US gov has guns and influence and various levers
- US gov will definitely protect Apple from guns of EU (so regulator with guns is a bit mute point)
- Apple is important to americans (I think they feel it’s their symbol or something), so officials in US gov might think it’s good opportunity to grab some political points.
- US gov might act to help out Apple in this dispute (Nothing like a war, but some slight nod or handshake; maybe via diplomatic backwater; maybe in exchange for something)
Though most probably apple will give “something” even if minor change in the rules, at least just so EU would not loose face, to keep relationship friendly. (But it will be move in the right direction)
https://www.theverge.com/24107581/doj-v-apple-antitrust-mono...
The US might act in various ways to protect American manufacturers, or oil industry, or other industries that are responsible for a lot of jobs in the US or are a strategic resource in some other way. See the 100% tax import for Chinese EVs. The US government doesn't care about Apple. Apple's economic impact is basically irrelevant for the US, because it doesn't provide a noteworthy number of jobs or any significant supply chain within the US. Apple's use as a strategic resource is completely irrelevant based on their antagonistic behavior towards the US government and they've shown themselves to be as eager to comply with Chinese laws as they are to flout US government policies.
I'd maybe see the US do something to protect Microsoft, with its deep ties to the military industrial complex, or Intel, which has both these ties and is clearly a strategic resource because of the advanced chips it provides, but really only if there were an existential threat that would also prevent Microsoft or Intel from performing their necessary roles in the US economy, the military and in US foreign policy.
But to suggest that US guns are in any way relevant, or that the US would bother trying to protect Apple, is frankly absurd.
The EU has smacked down Meta, Google and Microsoft already for things they felt were anti-competitive. The US didn't give a shit. Why would it be any different here?
This has been observed and written about since at least the 18th century
This is also why Nintendo (when they moved into video games) set up their business model as platform-holder, not just game developer. And their own games are primarily there to seed the platform.
But Apple is not subsidising phones in any way.
Developing first-party games costs more money, to both Nintendo and consumers, so it's the opposite of a subsidy. But they're compelling enough, they clear the purchase threshold and establish the platform on which the rest of the business is built.
But I strongly doubt that your business model would even approach #1 spot on S&P index.
If you are looking for advice on your business model..
> Whipping homeless people
On avg. homeless people are less competent part of the bell curve. Don’t limit yourself, toss the “homeless” restriction.
You could reduce cost by mostly just threatening to whip, and to actually demonstrate the whipping only on Mondays, just to prove that it happens.
Also, micro-management has serious downsides. It does not build trust, it eats away at initiative and motivation.