So is it a duopoly or a monopoly? I'm fine with just throwing around words in casual conversation, but the closer the conversation moves towards the orbit of law, the more words will matter.
> If some big app owner like Facebook or AirBnb came out and said "We're only supporting Android now, so please switch phones to use our service" they'd just go out of business. That's the essence of monopolism.
I think that's just called bad decision making, which vendors are completely free to make. There are plenty of apps that are Android only, and I'm sure they fully realize their revenue will be less as a result. There are also plenty of third party game developers making exclusive titles for Playstation or Xbox all the time. They're roughly neck and neck outside of Japan, but in Japan, it's no contest, Playstation is completely dominant. Assuming we ignore Nintendo, would you then suggest that Sony has a monopoly on consoles there? One could claim that if you're a developer in Japan and you don't target Playstation in Japan, you're going to lose. But if the goal is maximum revenue ...that's just bad decision making. If the Xbox market in Japan just isn't coughing up dollars, how is that Sony's problem?
Rather than continuously trying to compare Apple to a monopoly, which it isn't, I think the more effective comparison would be with RAND and FRAND. I don't know what kind of legal hoops would need to be jumped through to make the legal justification work, but it seems like Apple has an essential technology (the App Store), and must be obligated to license it (arguably reflected via the fee it charges), but that is an extant example of government regulation where the fee could be legally managed.