What do you mean Standard Oil has a monopoly? You could heat your house with a wood-burning fireplace. Or keep your horse instead of getting a car! And the railroads? Just load up your donkey! Import some elephants! USE YOUR IMAGINATION!

Almost all monopolies have substitute products or services. And few of them have a literal 100% market share. Thankfully antitrust law wasn’t written to be countered by such naive, basic arguments.

Antitrust law was created to deal with the problems we are having in mobile software distribution BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT SPECIAL! Same monopoly forces, extracting the same rents, applying the same bullying. This is a distribution monopoly. Classic tollbooth. Like rail. Like telecom.

And you know this is true because there’s no competition even though the tollbooths are worth billions and billions! Another trillion-dollar company tried, remember? Microsoft didn’t give up because the rewards weren’t there. They gave up because the lock-in was too tight.

This is when we need antitrust! When competition stops working, markets fail, and you end up with consolidated power doing what consolidated power does: take advantage of the situation! Apple is the most valuable company in the world because of this advantage.

When you hear “well, you could just build your own phone and your own operating system and your own App Store and then YOU COULD MAKE YOUR OWN RULES” know that antitrust law was designed to reject this argument! It looks at practical market power, not theoretical escapes.

This is a key point. Both Apple and Google have used monopoly power in one domain to capture monopoly power in another. Multiple interlocking monopolies combine to make realistic competition impossible. Again, antitrust law WAS DESIGNED WITH THIS IN MIND. https://twitter.com/jamestheswift/status/1360309896047124494