In all the hullabaloo around this drama, I haven't seen any actual mention about what anti trust/ competition is supposed to be about. All I see is "private company, anything goes" vs "Apple owns the market. Apple bad".
Not a lawyer. But I've heard some podcasts with lawyers on them. So I'm basically an expert. Isn't the whole pov of courts supposed to be: is this harmful to the consumer? They arrived at this "razor" because just being big and successful by itself isn't automatically bad. What if you're huge because run your business better than everyone else? What if you use your size to invest in more efficient capex that lets you make stuff cheaper? If you pass those on to the consumer, that should be kosher.
If you use your large size to push for things that's only good for your own bottom line and pass that cost on to your partners, who then have to pass it onto the customer, then by my crude layman's definition of anti competitiveness, Apple looks very naughty. Especially when the reason you can push certain unpalatable things is because your business is so pervasive and has high switching costs. Most of the time it's fine to let businesses charge whatever the hell they want. If eBay went from 10% fees to 30%! fees people could just go to any other market place. Yeah it sucks to relist inventory, copy photos over, start with no feedback, but it's doable.
But I can't just switch simply from Apple to Android. Do you remember the first time you tried to use Linux or macos? How painful was that? And we're nerds! How is the majority of people who don't give a shit about tech deal?
And I see the argument of "Apple good" because most of the experience just works so I can definitely swallow a closed appstore with any fees they want to impose.
That's exactly the problem though. This is using their size and prevalence in their customers lives to their own disadvantage. This feels anti competitive