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Comment by stahtops | Hacker News Reader

I just don’t get the outrage. If you made HATS and wanted to sell them at STORE, do you think you get to just walk into STORE and tell the manager/owner:

1) find some space on the shelf and your stock room to put my stuff! 2) I don’t have a store with shelves or visiting customers, but you will sell this for me at 0% profit!

You’re paying for sales access to millions of devices with frictionless checkout.

And you want to… make it harder to check out? Because you think you’re entitled sell things to their user base?

No one wants to go to your website. You’re crazy.

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Agree.

However, in this scenario every neighbourhood only has 2 STORES - and each CUSTOMER only shops at one of these STORES.

Then, if you made HATS, the only way to sell HATS is to get them on the shelves of both those stores.

This is Australia: two major supermarkets - so the only way to sell a lot of your product is to submit to the terms of Coles or Woolworths.

You're forgetting some detail in your example, which is that

1. the existing STORES also sell almost all the CARS, and the GPS in these cars is hardcoded to only drive to one of their STORES

2. The government is considering a law that forces everyone to show their ID to open the door and drive their CAR,

3. To enfore #2, the government is considering a law to prevent drivers from manually entering GPS coordinates to any other stores, because the two existing STORES promise to enforce the ID-verification system in their parking lots.

Now you want to sell your HAT, good luck, because anybody trying to open up a Hat-Droid store with your product in it, is soon legally prevented from doing so. For security purposes. Think of the children!

I think the fundamental thing here is that this isn't merely a store. The Apple ecosystem is large enough to BE a market in itself.

It's not about the market for apps, or the market for smartphones. Those markets are comparable to any market.

This is about the market for apps ON the apple ecosystem. And the problem that is being solved is: Apple can't have a monopoly on that market, such that they can (for example) charge a commission for every sale.

Basically: we can't allow a company to be so successful that their STORE becomes a MARKET.

You’re making a lot of statements here with no supporting argument.

Plenty of other companies manufacture hardware and run stores. If we’re going to say that isn’t allowed, then at least make the rule across the board.

How many new companies will be popping up to manufacture these types of devices? Not many.

I think the reality is that the EU sees an opportunity to apply some pressure on a few successful foreign companies, as that potentially provides them leverage in other negotiations, or at the very least some revenue from fines.

> Plenty of other companies manufacture hardware and run stores.

How does that matter? Are you suggesting we must treat a massive company the same as a not-massive company? Once they reach a certain size, they're at risk of being a monopoly. Until they do, they're not. This is just a matter of size.

Well I’m definitely going to suggest that you don’t understand the definition of the word monopoly, because it has nothing to do with “size”.

What I’m suggesting is that it’s at best sloppy, and at worst corrupt, to arbitrarily apply rules in the way the EU is doing. If you think it’s wrong for a hardware manufacturer to be the sole operator of an app or software store on their platform, that’s fine. Make your rule, apply it to everyone, and give people N years to come into compliance.

The reason the EU isn’t doing that in these cases is because they don’t want to apply these laws to EU companies, and it gives them leverage in negotiations with foreign companies.

At least try to make the situation comparable:

If you made HATS and sold them at a STORE (is the all caps thing legalese or why do we talk this this?), and the owner of BIGGEST HAT STORE walked into your STORE and told you:

"Nice STORE you have there! Would be a shame if something happened to all those HATS of yours. Pay us a five percent commission, otherwise your HATS will stop working."

We have a word for those situations, and any democratic society nip that particular type of entrepreneurship in the bud. It's just that we should have done something long before our pensions were dependent on these companies which are now too big to fail.

I guess we can all make up analogies that don’t resonate with other people?

You’re describing racketeering, and in your analogy, you have a store.

But in reality, you don’t have a store, so the hypothetical doesn’t make any sense.

Do you want to try rail lines? You want to ship your HATS on a freight TRAIN, but you don’t have a TRAIN or even a RAIL.

Do you think the rail owner or the freight train will carry your product for free?

But of course you have a store. That's the whole point and that's what you analogy missed. The point was to be able to sell services outside the Apple store, in another store.

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