Please forgive the dashed-off nature of this post. My plan was to spend yesterday writing something substantial and thought-out, but I got sidetracked with programming and the time sort of vanished. I don’t have many images to make it look pretty, but I’ve made up for it by having extra typos. Yo’ure welcome.<\/p>\n
One of the great annoyances of talking about Big Tech is that for a lot of people, the word “monopoly” has come to mean “really big annoying company”. Facebook is a monopoly? Apple is a monopoly? Google is a monopoly? Microsoft is a monopoly? Steam is a monopoly? Monopolies everywhere!<\/p>\n
In my understanding of the word, a monopoly is when you have one and only one company providing a good or service. My local gas company is a monopoly, because I can’t buy natural gas from anyone else. The pipes in my house lead directly to their… gas-making stuffLook, I have no idea how utilities work, okay?<\/span>. Same goes for water, electricity, and garbage pickup. Not only are these companies monopolies, they provide essential services. And so there are all kinds of extra rules in place to keep an eye on them because of the special position they holdAre these laws any good? I don’t know.<\/span>.<\/p>\n But none of the big tech companies have the same sort of universal control. Apple users are always free to switch to AndroidHaving said that, I’m willing to bet that doing so is a massive pain in the ass.<\/span>. Google users are free to switch to DuckDuckGo or (God help you) Bing. <\/p>\n I’m not sure if this shift in meaning is more international or generational. Maybe people outside the USA have different attitudes about what the word means and what should be permitted. Maybe young people have appropriated the word to mean roughly “companies that are so big it SHOULD be illegal.” I don’t know, but it really does make a mess of a lot of discussions.<\/p>\n I was surprised how many people were willing to cheer for Epic in the #FreeFortnite<\/a> campaign. The thrust of the campaign is the idea that you should be able to sell stuff on Apple devices without paying Apple. That makes no sense to me.<\/p>\n Epic launched a lawsuit against Apple and<\/strong> Google. The fact that there are two<\/strong> companies to sue sort of demonstrates that neither of them is a monopoly.<\/p>\n I get that the complaint is that Apple has a monopoly on Apple devices. Which, okay. But… so what? <\/p>\n Maybe this comes down to what mental model you use to think about the phones and their app stores. I think of the Apple Store like any other store. If I want to sell my goods at Walmart, then I need to give Walmart a cut. To me, Epic trying to sell Fornite V-bucks on an Apple phone without paying Apple is like me wandering into Walmart and selling wristwatches out of my trench coat. It makes total sense to me that you’re not allowed to do that. <\/p>\n This is doubly baffling to me because Apple has been doing stupid, infuriating stuff for years and nobody seems to care. Their hardware is shockingly overpriced. And on top of that, they love to hit you with crazy bullshit like randomly incompatible proprietary cables just so they can charge you five times what a standard recharging cable costs<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\nFor the record: I am not an Apple user and I only understand the platform by reputation. My Android phone is at least 3 years old and I’m not really into mobile gaming, so it’s likely I’m missing some context on how the top-tier phones work. <\/p>\n