Apple worked for 7 years to develop Apple Pay and increase its acceptance. They invested a lot of resources into developing a platform that US customers want use and provide additional security by requiring biometric verification at the point of sale.
Let's use a real example. Apple and Microsoft and the standard video format. Microsoft and Apple both invested a lot of time and resources to have people use .mov and DirectX. They both convinced users and businesses these developments were secure, tested, efficient, and adaptable. They even tried to convince each other to cooperate to make things easier for interoperability and efficiency.
What did the court think, when it compared DirectX and .mov to Internet Explorer? It sort of thought like it could think about Apple Pay one day. The reasoning for why predatory and exclusionary pressure on the market to maintain a "durable" position is irrelevant. The product can be incredible, but also irrelevant after seven years of marketing in terms of illegal monopolization. The question is whether Apple's techniques and practices are limiting market participation generally. It has nothing to do with Apple Pay's qualifications or Apple's business acumen if the effect violates trade laws, which no one knows yet. There is Google, Samsung, and Apple Pay... maybe Wells Fargo VISA PayPal-Mo would be a good consumer option, if it could use the simple Apple Pay system:
...
"The discussions over multimedia playback software culminated in a meeting between executives from Microsoft and Apple executives, including Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, at Apple's headquarters on June 15, 1998. Microsoft's objective at the meeting was to secure Apple's commitment to abandon the development of multimedia playback software for Windows.
At the meeting, one of the Microsoft executives, Eric Engstrom, said that he hoped the two companies could agree on a single configuration of software to play multimedia content on Windows. He added, significantly, that any unified multimedia playback software for Windows would have to be based on DirectX. If Apple would agree to make DirectX the standard, Microsoft would be willing to do several things that Apple might find beneficial...
"Jobs reserved comment during the meeting with the Microsoft representatives, but he explicitly rejected Microsoft's proposal a few weeks later.
Had Apple accepted Microsoft's proposal, Microsoft would have succeeded in limiting substantially the cross-platform development of multimedia content. In addition, Apple's future success in marketing authoring tools for Windows 95 would have become dependent on Microsoft's ongoing cooperation, for those tools would have relied on the DirectX technologies under Microsoft's control.
"Apple's surrender of the multimedia playback business might have helped users in the short term by resolving existing incompatibilities in the arena of multimedia software.
In the long run, however, the departure of an experienced, innovative competitor would not have tended to benefit users of multimedia content. At any rate, the primary motivation behind Microsoft's proposal to Apple was not the resolution of incompatibilities that frustrated consumers and stymied content development. Rather, Microsoft's motivation was its desire to limit as much as possible the development of multimedia content that would run cross-platform.
