It should work forever, as long you own the field, and people want to use said field because that gives them access to a huge marketplace of devices that you've built and sold.
You lost me with your analogy. Let me extend the pigskin thought exprement a bit.
If I own the football team, and the field, and the city (hell, why not), then sure I can choose who plays QB, so I choose my son. Maybe at the start he's even not that bad of a QB, and our team wins some games. Everyone is happy.
After a little while though, people realize there's no sense trying out for QB on my team. My son, now left without anyone gunning for his job becomes complacent. We start losing games more and more.
With enough control over the market (like Apple has with the App Store), there become less and less QBs to choose from, and it's not just my team that gets worse, but the whole league.
Apple built, run, maintains and owns a stadium. The stadium has a food court with many food stalls.
Some of them, Apple runs themselves, but tons of others are run by people who pay N% of their revenues to Apple to be able to have them.
They still need to supply their own food, branding, marketing, furniture, and pay their staff, Apple gives them access to the stadium crowds and a payment processing system.
Apple is not obligated to advertise those third party stalls over their own.
If they don't like the arrangement they can always go somewhere else (there is an even bigger stadium in town that has available food stalls).
Yes, and that's part of why you pay $10 for a domestic beer, and $5 for a hot dog.
So the argument is going to boil down to this... Is the curation Apple does to the App Store worth market effects of effectively turning it into a stadium for software? Given that I can't easily give my friend the tool I built to run on their phone, and the App Store is filled with "bad" apps (by basically every definition), I'm going to argue it's not worth it.
But what if you’re not selling food, but merchandise targeted at this particular team’s fans. You can’t easily move shop to the other stadium - you have no choice but to suck up the fact that on the vendor map of the stadium, where it says merchandise, is actually Apple’s food court. Nobody is going to find your t’shirt stand.
For starters, nobody forces you to sell merchandise for this particular team's fans...
But the analogy breaks down here, because merchandize such as t-shirts is not dependent on the stadium to be used. You could sell it outside the stadium.
Whereas iOS software leverages the fact that the iOS is being sold, maintained, having the necessary APIs, and so on, and that iOS devices are being made and sell decently and lure people willing to pay for apps.
So it's like you want to sell a ware that's inherently dependent on the stadium (hence my stall analogy), but you don't like the terms of the stadium builder/owner/maintainer that allows businessmen to have those stalls on their stadium...
The physical analogy (i.e., stadium) doesn't work at all for the appstore, because aspects of the physical world actually matter in terms of analyzing retail monopolies in ways that are irrelevant to a fully digital marketplace.
So it's like you want to sell a ware that's inherently dependent on the stadium (hence my stall analogy), but you don't like the terms of the stadium builder/owner/maintainer that allows businessmen to have those stalls on their stadium...
A privately owned stadium is not be required to open up its space to third-party sellers. But once it does, it cannot then abuse its position as the landlord to interfere with the market activities of those third parties. That's the part you're missing in your fervent defense of Apple's antitrust activities--Apple didn't have to open up the app store to third parties, but having done so, they must now act in a non-abusive matter.
> it's not just my team that gets worse, but the whole league
I don't understand how you arrived at this conclusion.
I figured that it'd mean nobody tries out for QB on your team, all the best QBs go to other teams, eventually your team starts to suck and lose fans and therefore revenue, and the market forces either force you to get a new QB or your business in the team suffers and maybe folds. Problem solved either way, eventually.
I said "With enough control over the market ...", which is basically a way of saying I'm making these QB choices for not just my team, but some large enough set of the QBs in the NFL.
It's as if you're the one selling all the tickets to the only stadium in town, and you make it so that when your team plays, tickets are cheaper, more abundant, and more visible.
Another local team wants to play too, but their ticket prices are outrageous, there's no promotion of the event either, and they might actually be banned from the stadium unless they use ONLY your equipment.
Your analogy also isn't very good, your town has lots of other stadiums: The Samsung Galaxarium, The Googlplexel, The LG Centre, The Huawei Dome. Sure the Apple one is pretty fancy and the rules are onerous but there are plenty of other places to do business.
An iOS app/ticket/whatever wouldn't work/get you into the other "stadiums." Ergo, the market for the iOS thing does not include those other "stadiums."
Repeated for emphasis: it's irrelevant that there are other mobile app stores, because you can't sell iOS apps on them. The antitrust issues are related to Apple's actions within the iOS app market. Authorities can and do segment markets based on meaningful distinctions ,like the fact that iOS apps wouldn't work on an Android phone.
>Repeated for emphasis: it's irrelevant that there are other mobile app stores, because you can't sell iOS apps on them.
Repeated for emphasis: it's irrelevant that you can't sell iOS apps on them. Selling iOS apps is not a basic human right, nor a market right. As long as you can still sell apps, there's no judge who cares if you can specifically sell iOS apps.
You can't sell your physical products at Costco either unless they accept them, and even if they do, they are always free to promote and prioritize their own brand over yours...
>Authorities can and do segment markets based on meaningful distinctions ,like the fact that iOS apps wouldn't work on an Android phone.
Only for authorities that's not a meaningful distinction...
For the authorities it's not just a meaningful distinction, it's the basis of their antitrust investigations, namely that Apple is engaging in anticompetitive practices in the iOS app market.
