Here's what I don't get. If you don't like the business deal one person offers, you do business with another person instead. If you don't like the price of a hotel, you choose another hotel. If you don't like the wages from your job, you hustle and get a promotion or get another job that pays more. So why does that logic suddenly disappear when it comes to (some) app developers? Apple forces absolutely no one to use their app store or their ecosystem. If you don't like Apple's percentages, don't publish your apps on the App Store. It's simple.
I frequently see this kind of argument presented and it always baffles me how anyone still thinks it's in any way valid. I'll even use your own example to show how dumb it is.
"If you don't like the price of a hotel, you choose another hotel".
Ok, what if there are only two hotels in existence? What if both charge the same price and both discriminate identically about who is allowed in their hotel? What if the cost of building a hotel to compete against this duopoly is so enormous that even the biggest possible potential competitor in the industry with tens of billions of dollars at its disposal gives up trying to because it's impossible to disrupt (Microsoft)?
"JusT cHooSe AnotHer hOTeL".
Brilliant. Same as "just build your own app store." "Just build your own internet infrastructure".
There's a point beyond which this is not a valid argument. Apple and Google's duopoly control of 99.9% of the mobile ecosystem IS this point.
I don't care how much money they invested in it, how much it costs them to maintain it, etc. Irrelevant. At a certain point, you're too powerful to be allowed continue the way you are. Apple make more than enough money to drop their commissions by at least half and still be enormously profitable. And if they want to act as gatekeepers and decide who gets to have an app in their store, they need to be forced to allow
anyone to publish as long as the app isn't breaking the laws of the land (
not the subjective laws of their own app store) or, enable people to install an app on their iPhone from outside the app store and still access all native OS features like push notifications, sensors, etc.
Hotels are not vital to the economy, or indeed society at large. Smartphones are, and at this point, the duopoly operating systems and their respective app stores are so vital to the functioning of a giant slice of the economy, that for them to close down would be absolutely devastating. Too big to fail doesn't even come close. We're
way beyond that point. Comparing the App store and Play store to a hotel is so ludicrous that I can't believe anyone actually thinks they could fool people into thinking they are remotely equivalent.
When a company gets too powerful it should be broken up or regulated. Companies are supposed to serve people. The moment they become too big to fail, or too powerful to compete against, the government should intervene. At this point, iOS and Android are so important to modern life that I think the government should actually take an ownership stake in them. If that's too "un-American" for some hardcore capitalists then at least enact some other mechanism that puts some control or major oversight on them. Anti-trust legislation that forces them to open up would be a start, but it should really go much further. We don't have to go full China and do what they do with their tech behemoths, but we have to do
something.
There's a world of difference between some Mom 'n' Pop business and these multinational tech giants. To think of them as merely "businesses" you can choose to deal with or not is beyond naive.
