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Comment by voisin | Hacker News Reader

> And I'd do the same with Meta, Apple, etc.

I agree re Meta, but I am not sure Apple should be in the same category. I think Google and Meta use a small subset of golden goose businesses to subsidize perpetual money losers that prevent competition and actual self sufficient business models from emerging, all for the sake of preventing the emergence of another conglomerate that might come for the original golden goose. Apple doesn’t seem to fit this model - all of its businesses more than 3-5 years old seem to be wildly profitable. It isn’t like the iPhone is subsidizing the Watch, or Services. They are all successful, self sufficient businesses.

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I think yes and no for Apple. It's certainly making a ton of money off of each of its devices (Watch, iPad, Mac, etc.), but none of those devices (with the exception of the Mac, probably) would sell as well without the iPhone's ecosystem.

In some hypothetical universe where the Watch and iPad were from distinct companies, they might have to force interoperability with other products like the Pixel or Galaxy Watch to make the iPhone a compelling product.

I think the only case for Apple exerting monopoly power is in the App Store and the iOS walled garden model. If the EU DMA was brought to the US, I don’t see a valid antitrust case against Apple for any other business they do.

You could argue separating the services components (App Store, TV+, Apple Music) from the devices business, but I don’t think there’s any validity in segmenting iPhone from anything else or any of their hardware business as a whole.

With iOS I think it is just enough to prohibit Apple from taking 30% cut from App Store installations. Similar how Microsoft cannot ask for 30% from any app installed in Windows (unless it is done from the store). In case of Apple, AppStore is basically Windows comparison - the only way to access "internet" so to say.

I think you have that the wrong way around, artificially limiting their %cut would be a kludge (who even decides what's fair?) and it wouldn't resolve other issues related to their death grip over app distribution such as arbitrary rules and censorship.

In this case there's a perfectly usable market solution to the problem.

Apple should be allowed to ask for any %cut they want, but others should be allowed to compete on equal footing and without Apple positioning themselves in the middle of every transaction, which is how they're trying to work around the EU DMA using notarization requirements and their "core technology" fee.

Meta only wishes they were impactful enough to be broken up. Their products aren’t really that important and it’s really easy to avoid them. If all of Meta’s products disappeared they would be replaced in a day.

It’s a little harder to avoid Google or Amazon or Apple in one’s everyday life. If one of these companies disappeared, it would take some time to fill that hole in the market.

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