@jjoelson @matthewstoller I won't argue that the process is ideal. But here's the situation. 1/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller We in fact have antitrust laws strong enough to permit courts and regulators to act as DMA-style referees, and ensure firms act in ways that allow and encourage competition while they create value. Until the 1970s, firms in the US understood that even narrowly procompetitive actions that threatened competition in the longer term (a big firm competing aggressively in a new local market) would draw scrutiny. 2/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller Those laws haven't changed. A "revolution" occurred solely at the level of enforcement during the 1980s. Lots of stuff that was obviously illegal under the laws currently on the books and the way regulators and courts had previously interpreted them were suddenly effectively legal, because courts and regulators were persuaded, on the merits and by lobbyist $$$, to change their interpretation, or even simply to not enforce black-letter law. 3/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller (an obvious, Apple-related example of this is the Apple-Google relationship. advantageous product placement in exchange for kickbacks — "payola" was the name for it — is explicitly illegal in the United States. Apple and Google, along with every grocery store chain, do it anyway, because during the 1980s regulators explicitly decided they would not enforce that law.) 4/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller At the same time, we do not have a Congress capable of passing or managing serious new regulation of this extraordinarily powerful industry (not just Apple!) that is currently reshaping society in ways we may not like. Congress' dysfunction is a huge problem that will eventually be fatal to us as a nation if we don't fix it. But it is the present, and we need to stumble along until we do fix it. 5/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller So, in practice, our choices are to revive our dormant antitrust laws, and try as a public to encourage and discipline regulators to use that authority well and not ridiculously, or leave Apple — and Google, and Meta, and Microsoft — to reshape our society and markets as they will and have, in ways that most of us dislike far outside the narrow boundaries of product choices. (The nature of innovation has changed, under the behemoths.) 6/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller I agree that enforcement actions and court-cases and consent decrees might not be the optimal approach to restructuring tech markets, but they are for the near and medium term the only approach we have. Again, this is industry-wide. It's not an Apple thing. DoJ is saying to all the industry incumbents, we're all going to do things differently now, we're restructuring the market. 7/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller I'm very glad this is happening, even if in an ideal world I might want Congress to create a new agency that would build tremendous in-house expertise and perhaps develop standards as well as having coercive regulatory authority. But that's not on the table for now. 8/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller So far, everything regulators have asked for seem reasonable to me. In theory, you can be mad that big-firm innovation is now going to be second-guessed by antitrust regulators. But in practice, it seems to me we've erred much to long in the opposite direction, and its much too early to be worrying about ways that Apple will be constrained we don't like. 9/

@jjoelson As @matthewstoller points out in his piece, Apple now has tremendous market power we as consumers or developers don't even see. It's not cool that Apple gets to dictate product choices to car makers as a condition of getting CarPlay for example. Information technology coordinates all the things. If we let governance of information technology fall to a single or few private firms, we are ceding governance in general to those firms, it's an end of democracy. 10/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller How we arrange information technology is necessarily a public matter. It is absolutely true that Apple is in many respects a fantastic firm that has provided huge value to many of us. I've lived a long life in their ecosystems, and they've always been better than the alternatives. But that doesn't mean I'm willing to cede governance of society and markets to Apple (and Google and Meta and Amazon and Microsoft) shareholders. 11/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller That's basically what we've done, are on a long road down a path towards. I am delighted and excited that regulators are finally recovering their wits to do something about it, with the long-disused, now rather creaky, tools they have available. 12/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller We should of course object if they are doing things that will really kill the golden goose. But Apple, in fact, really doth protest too much. They really do do a lot of bad stuff that regulators should stop. Preventing repair and hardware interop. Blocking surveillance by Meta, but building it into iAd. They belong under scrutiny, just like their IMHO even shittier peers. /fin

@jjoelson @matthewstoller I was drawing an analogy between network effects and integration effects, not saying that Apple has network effects in the same way as Meta. In both cases, real value is provided to users. In both cases, we have allowed that value to be provided in ways that grant first-movers incredible advantages and market power. That is the problem to be remedied. 1/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller Network effects should belong to the public network, should not be Meta's private database. Integration effects should be provided in ways that allow third-parties to fully integrate and compete. Apple used to do that. Those old, scrapped User Interface Guidelines were a genius approach to letting third parties provide software that merged seamlessly with first-party software without granting first-party applications special advantages. 2/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller Fundamentally, what the antitrust work against Apple is about is not undoing the integration, but about requiring Apple to maximize the ability of third parties to fully integrate in ways that mean first party services have to compete. Apple can—if it is smart, will—fully maintain its marvelous integration, and let others plug into it on terms it doesn't unilaterally dictate, but must publicly in justify in ways competition authorities can understand and accept. 3/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller If Apple wants to maintain the simplicity of the App Store, it can do so, just let third parties be plugins to the same interface, like Amazon and merchants. (If they wish to maintain the branding of their curation, they can use skinning within the App Store app.) Letting PWAs be first class apps is pro-integration. The value of integration grows with what you can integrate! Why does Apple need a payments monopoly for integration? etc. /fin

@jjoelson @matthewstoller It is absolutely true that people stick around because the integration make the sum greater than the parts. It's also true that people stick around Meta products because the extensive social network makes it better than competitors, and that Google can (at least used to be able to) do search better than competitors because the volume of queries gave it an informational edge. Network effects, like integration synergies, confer real value. 1/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller But when they are permitted (by regulatory lapses) to confer that value in a ways that allow a single firm to capture and control it, that is an antitrust problem. 2/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller Meta's social products have a real-user-value, advantage over anything competitors can provide. So they can get away with being shitty in lots of ways and still keep their users. Their market power comes from the real value of networks. 3/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller The policy error is, if markets are to remain competitive, the real value of network effects has to be placed in a location in some sense public. And that's technically possible. There's nothing "natural" about firms owning and controlling network effects. 4/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller Similarly, Apple's integration does confer real value! I'm angry at Apple, but I'm still on the platform (as is my whole family and most of my friends) for a reason. Just like lots of people are still on Instagram for a good reason, even though it's not hard to come up with what might be better products technically than Instagram. Network effects, integration, all provide real value, but also, if poorly arranged, provide incumbents with anticompetitive market power. 5/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller The issue isn't that Apple has done something "wrong" in building out useful integration. From a mile-high perpsective, it's policymakers who have done something wrong by structuring mkts in ways that allow network and integration effects to belong to single corporate incumbents. Google, Apple, Meta have insane margins. They could have faced lots more competition and still been incentivized to do the good part of their work, and had better mkt signals to guide them. 6/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller Antitrust is the tool we have to remedy that. Neither Apple nor Google nor Meta are entitled to the post-1980s market structure that did not take seriously balancing the relative market power of producers, as well as narrow consumer welfare, in deciding what kinds of corporate behavior are tolerable. We are in the midst of undoing that policy error, which means all of these companies will have to change how they do business. 7/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller The way that happens is antitrust. We tell these firms, you know what, ways of doing business that seemed tolerable a decade ago has led to outcomes we don't like, and we're not going to allow it ay more. We're going to put you under pressure to find ways of making available the real value of integration and networks and everything in ways that encourage more balanced market power among producers. 8/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller Apple — and Meta and Google and Microsoft — will of course consider this unfair. You are changing the rules of the game on us midstream! But this game isn't set up for their benefit. We structure markets for the benefit of the public. The public is not well served by a world dominated by behemoths of arbitrary decisions are poorly disciplined by competition, and by the innovation disincentive of entrenched incumbency. 9/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller We are working to undo that. Apple won't like it (and despite what you might think, overall I like Apple, they are by far my favorite of the behemoths). It's still absolutely the right thing to do. /fin

@jjoelson @matthewstoller I agree! The mail team is infinitessimal as a cost! That's why I find it extraordinary, and insulting, how profoundly Apple lets its "inframarginal" apps deteriorate. Again, if they want to do consistency, fine. They could have invested the time and focus to make the mobile subset consistent on Mac while making Mail a great client on the desktop, fully exploiting desktop affordances. 1/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller They don't. They don't because they are under no competitive pressure to do so. That's why there's an antitrust concern. It's not Mail per se. It's that they obviously have a lot of substandard products that nevertheless are widely used because default status + privileged integration make them more convenient for those in the ecosystem. Mail is unimportant (from DoJ perspective) in itself, but it's evidence the best app doesn't win under the rigged game Apple has made.

@jjoelson @matthewstoller Apple does not prevent 3rd parties from releasing great mail apps. A few suffer and try. It's just mail apps are a dead market, because 90%+ of users rely on platform defaults or mail-provider web or mobile apps. Apple knows this. The reason it doesn't invest in mail isn't because it's trying against hope to help out Spark or Edison or Airmail. Mail is what Mac users use, if they're not at gmail.com. It doesn't pay to bother making it great.

@jjoelson @matthewstoller The antitrust case is not about any particular app. Apple does not have a monopoly over mail. It has tremendous market power, because it strives to make its platform sticky, not just by making it "insanely great", but by making it difficult and expensive to make choices that compete with it. It's not Mail's near monopoly that's the issue. It's that letting apps become crap without hemorrhaging users is exploitation of and evidence of market power.

@jjoelson @matthewstoller Lots of apps access the Photo library (and Apple has gotten better on privacy grounds, allowing users to choose to limit access to particular photos). But Apple controls what it lets people do with those apps. It was a while ago (a while for me could be a decade) when I searched for 3rd party apps that might let me shuffle through my photo library, ideally to find something that would shuffle my library as a slideshow, but let me pause or go back to add metadata. 1/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller I used to spend many hours adding metadata to my photo library. That doesn't feel wise anymore. The apps I found at the time said they could not, per Apple's policies, shuffle photos directly from the Photos library. I'm searching for that developer's explanation, but it (and his app) seem to be gone. I'll check the current round of apps. I'm curious whether I can now do what I want. /fin