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Comment by itopaloglu83 | Hacker News Reader

I think the EU started with the correct intentions. They saw a need to increase the competition in the digital marketplace and reduce the power iOS-Android duopoly has.

However, instead of defining the market rules, the process has been more about competitors and companies (who’re not happy with Apple’s success) trying to take a chunk of their business.

An iPhone is not a general computation device, it’s not an open ecosystem. Neither PlayStation, but there’s enough competition in the gaming console sector so nobody comes up with complains about not being able to install any app they want.

Edit: spelling and clarity.

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> An iPhone is not a general computation device, it’s not an open ecosystem.

And yet it's many people's primary computing device. That's exactly the problem.

As a historical example, consider telecommunications. Phone networks were "natural monopolies" for many decades, and people must have found it hard to imagine any other way back then. Without regulatory intervention enforcing competition, we'd probably still be paying double-digit cent amounts for long-distance calls.

We're not seeing the forest for the trees here. There are a lot of smartphone manufacturers they could've bought from, they didn't have to buy from Apple, that's not a monopoly at that point in time. They knew the limitations when they bought the device and also the entire ecosystem was created with this in mind, so asking Apple to change over a decades of work in 3 months is not fair either.

Apple entered the smartphone market as an almost bankrupt company and replaced the giants of its day like Nokia and Blackberry. And some other company will replace them someday. The DMA discussions started really good, I had really high hopes of it, but it got almost hijacked with various companies to publicly negotiate contracts with Apple and not for the public good as a market regulation.

Your analogy isn't analogous. Apple is not a network, let alone a public one. There are scads of hardware options other than Apple.

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