@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