Epic fog of monopoly
7min read
Apple .v. Epic court skirmish over whether the manner in which AppStore is effectively monopoly has played itself out. Only thing that hasn’t is the judges ruling which will come later.
Apple clearly made the case to its assertion that the AppStore was not a defacto monopoly by using a divide and conquer strategy. That worked. But it didn’t exonerate nor did it clear the charge of monopoly.
You need only see Apple monopoly practices at play in its NEWS.app to understand its use of power. NEWS conveniently provides all the sources of information in one place. NEWS cum dashboard-as-application enables you to pick and choose what you want to read. It provides an unfollow button to mute sources that you really don’t want to see.
Quietly Apple tracks your reading gaining insight to the kinds of information and sources you value most. One by one over time Apple quarantines these sources, certain stories with its “Subscription” requirement. Slowly you watch articles once read for free, as in free speech, are no longer - free.
Annoyed as more and more articles of interest get quarantined, a quick browser search confirms that the article remains freely available online, at the original sources news site. Apple are, not arbitrarily, using me against myself to earn subscription monies.
Frustrated at being used but appreciative of the convenience and context having one place to check what’s new in News, try deleting sources that Apple automatically populate into your News feed. That is even more interesting. Apple ignores the delete but removes the text of the body of each article. This basically executes a destructive disassembly of a fully functional News dashboard which exasperates an already frustrating experience. And so it goes with Apple.
Monopoly power enables Apple to make it so that you pay to play by their rules or suffer retribution and violence to your enjoyment of its free News.app, as in free beer. THUS Apple succeeds as its game of divide and conquer.
Only a preeminent gamesman could catch the switch up Apple uses between content and context. Epic called Apple on its conflagration and entrapment that plays on freedom. It caught utilization of the difference between free as in free speech and free as in free beer. Taking one away in one context while stealing users personal preferences to blackmail them into paying to view content that’s free in another context just for the privilege of using Apple’s free NEWS.app on its free AppStore.
This is the very essence of what is meant by the power of monopoly. When a company so controls the levers of Capitalism to the extent that it has captured the consumer, producer, developer, content, context and scope of the market in its entirety, that it enables a company to force rents in the face of all appearances where none are needed nor necessary - Monopoly as in illegal monopoly is enabling abuse of power.
That my dear readers is Apple.
related: see “AppStore emergent” post on this substack