> Apple is blocking competitors. It's anti-competitive.

I think you’re misunderstanding my point.

Every company works against their competition to one degree or another and every company has a monopoly to one degree or another.

If I would launch a new smartphone tomorrow with its own OS via which I restrict access to apps from sources approved by me, I effectively have a monopoly over it.

This all legal in the US antitrust framework, otherwise it would cause issues at all levels of commerce.

In fact, the Sherman Act, the first antitrust legislation in the US has section 2, the plain reading of which prohibits any form of monopoly. This was recognized to be so problematic that a whole history of case law was developed to prevent issues.
This lead to terms such as “innocent monopoly” to indicate monopolies derived from merit.

The DOJ has done a pretty good job going into the intricacies with copious amounts of citations to relevant cases[0], so I’ll leave you the link below instead of rehashing it all here.

The gist of it, however, is that mere monopolies aren’t so much the issue in modern US anti-trust enforcement (provided the monopolies weren’t attained by illegal means, which is not the case here), but rather abuse of power derived from that monopoly position or market dominance.

So when I say “Apple hasn’t abused its market position”, I’m saying Apple hasn’t used the market position they’ve gained over the years to force or influence others in an unlawful way. Which would be an anti-trust issue.

When Apple set the rules for their App Store they had no weight to throw around, they were a market entrant, some even argue that they created the market by doing so, but that’s not really relevant for the discussion. Because of that, they were unable to violate anti-trust law at the time, because they didn’t have market dominance.

What is relevant in the anti-trust context is when they gained dominance and if they since used that dominance in unlawful ways.
My argument is that they haven’t tightened the rules and in fact have lowered the commission in some cases, so there’s no anti-trust issue here.

This isn’t some standard of my making, this is an essential point in anti-trust actions.

Back during the Epic case I phoned in pretty much daily to follow the hearings and multiple days were spent trying to pinpoint when Apple gained market dominance (as it’s not something that happens overnight, so it takes some effort to come to that determination).
This was important, because it’s from that moment onwards Apple’s actions elicit more scrutiny.

Had they introduced stricter rules or increased commission after gaining market dominance, it would’ve been a clear case of anti-trust violation.

A good example close to the subject at hand is carrier bloatware and carrier influence in general. When Apple launched the first iPhone (i.e., when they were a market entrant with no significant market power), Apple told carriers that they wouldn’t be allowed to install their bloatware.
This was fine at the time because Apple had no market power.

Had they not done that and had they started to impose this restriction around the iPhone 6 for example, then that becomes a potential anti-trust issue, because now it can be argued that Apple is throwing its weight around to force carriers to do as they want (e.g., which was the crux of the issue in the MS case, where MS was throwing their weight around to get OEMs to do what they wanted).

Years later, when Apple introduced functionality such as Hotspot, Apple was too big to tell carriers what to do, as a result a lot of carriers in the US impose certain limits to the Hotspot functionality through carrier settings that are loaded in.

These are clear examples of issues that can rise to the levels of anti-trust violations.

The App Store doesn’t have these issues because they imposed the restrictions at its inception and lessened some of the detrimental sharper edges by lowering commissions in some cases.

This is all from the US anti-trust framework. The EU approaches this differently, but it too has limitations and it’ll be interesting to see how the European courts draw the lines.

> That's the whole basis of anti-trust: a bigger company requires more regulations to prevent them from hurting competition. No one cares when Softbank owns ARM, but it's an issue for Nvidia to buy it. Same with Figma and Adobe.

That’s only one aspect of anti-trust, specifically mergers, where horizontal mergers gain a lot of scrutiny and vertical mergers, while not an issue per se, can also elicit scrutiny.

In the context of Apple however, we’re talking about vertical integration through internal expansion, which is wholly outside the purview of anti-trust.

Because again, in the US, organic growth or merit based growth if you will, is almost considered sacred.
To legislators and courts alike, it’s merely a sign of success and we wouldn’t want to punish success in our hyper capitalistic society now would we?

All that said, I wasn’t talking about mergers. I was talking about actions that were retroactively deemed anti-competitive just because the company in question has grown exponentially (which is what the whole App Store issue would boil down to).

That’s just not going to happen in the US, because it opens up a whole can of worms that will reverberate throughout all levels of commerce big and small.

Sure the DOJ might take some pot shots, but unless they get Apple on unlawful acts borne out of their market position (i.e., imposing restrictions on things after they introduced it and after they gained a dominant market share in the relevant market), it won’t really go anywhere.

Hell, Microsoft was actively throwing their weight around and bullying OEMs into doing what MS wanted, and even then the DOJ didn’t manage to break up MS, instead they ended up settling with MS after an appeal overturned some of the key points in their case.

By comparison Apple is way smarter about it all. They don’t outright bully people around and they always introduce new stuff with restrictions from the outset, because they know they can always loosen up restrictions but they can never tighten them after the fact because of their size.

0: https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/competition-and-monopol...