I don't know the right way to describe it but Apple is the gatekeeper to their customers. I think it's accurate to say they sell access to their customers.
I'n saying that from a chip supply perspective Apple is "monopsony-ish" since they control so much of the demand for chips. This is probably true in many areas of their supply chain.
The "smell" of a monopsony is the ability to squeeze suppliers to the point of having the power to drive them out of business if they don't meet your terms.
Monopoly is not the same as anti-competitive tactics: monopoly is simply a control of a market segment, and while GP was using it a bit freely, affluent phone users are certainly a market segment.
A monopoly using anti-competitive tactics attracts regulatory review, but anti-competitive tactics are forbidden for both small and large companies.
The definition of monopoly has changed drastically over the course of time and will continue to do so.
Regardless of what you call it, any market vertical that you can define with less than 5 genuine competitors invariably winds up being anti-consumer and needs to get broken up.
Apple is the focus here, but Google is no better and neither is Microsoft. Search, messaging, email, video--all of these are easily definable market verticals.
All of these need to get broken up until we have at least a half-dozen competing companies in those spaces.
This isn't limited to tech. Grocery store chains, industrial suppliers, financial companies, etc. all need to get smacked with the same breakup stick--especially if we want not just to not only stomp out anti-consumer behavior but also to have genuine supply chain resilience.
> All of these need to get broken up until we have at least a half-dozen competing companies in those spaces.
You seem to be forgetting, we had your “at least a half-dozen competing companies" situation in the past. It was called the late 2000s and the early 2010s. And the reason it disappeared is not the traditional “everybody merges until only two or three are left standing”, it’s because iOS and Android were so much better than the competition that every other phone manufacturer starved to death or switched to Android.
By the time a new generation of smartphones with sufficiently-equivalent OSes had arrived — in the form of webOS and Microsoft Phone — iOS and Android were so established the newcomers couldn’t successfully compete.
Even today, while there are only two major OSes, there are still numerous successfully competing manufacturers: Samsung, Google, Apple, OnePlus, BLU, Lenovo/Motorola, Huwaei, Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo, etc. They all make mobile phones, with varying levels of market share across the world.
> it’s because iOS and Android were so much better than the competition that every other phone manufacturer starved to death or switched to Android.
I would argue that it was because Apple and Google could cross-subsidize the market from their other buisnesses.
Google viewed the ISPs as an existential threat and saw both mobile and fiber as a way to disintermediate them. Apple saw phones as an existential threat to iPod which was a huge chunk of their revenue.
Google didn't release Android until 2008. As of 2009 Nokia still had 33% market share and even Samsung(13%) and RIM (15%) beat Apple (11%).
> iOS and Android were so established the newcomers couldn’t successfully compete.
That is practically the definition of monopoly, you know?
We can certainly alter definitions when they’re not useful. Anti competitive situations are more complicated these days and redefining this word that is commonly used to point at this type of platform may be overdue. We obviously see definitions change for political reasons all the time these days so I’m not sure why we would avoid it here.
