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If Apple are a monopoly, so are Amazon.

Apple have a monopolistic control over how you sell software for their mobile devices, and Amazon have a similar monopolistic control over how you sell products on their website.

Both can only be an actual real monopoly if they had no realistic competitors. This is not the case for either Apple or Amazon.



You cannot have anything but a monopoly in your OWN environment.

I.e. Apple has a monopoly in the iOS App Store. Why wouldn't they? It's their store.


That kind of 'monopoly' isn't what people mean by 'monopoly'.

They're thinking of things like telcos who have (or had, in some cases) government-granted monopolies that prohibit potential competitors from even trying to compete, or they're thinking of cases like Microsoft back in the day when they used their leverage from a dominant position in one market to attempt to force out competitors in a different (but related) market. (By shipping IE for free at a loss to ensure that Netscape couldn't profit from selling a browser, for example.)

That's why people deliberately incorrectly use the term when referring to Apple. They're trying to evoke that feeling of a big corporation with an unfair advantage.

But that only works if Android doesn't exist, and BlackBerry doesn't exist, and Windows Phone/Mobile doesn't exist, and Symbian doesn't exist (which will be true soon, I guess!), and WebOS doesn't exist, and something prevents competitors from even trying to have their own mobile platform.


I guess we're extending the word to 'corner the market on a single platform', which you clearly object to.

So lets agree to say something else - perhaps "predatory marketing practice". What do you suggest?


How about "subscription pricing"?




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