@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

@jjoelson @matthewstoller I agree. One of the ways Mail very consequentially sucks, for example, is that searches visually appear complete when they are still in progress or when some error has occurred. So I tell a person, no, I’ve searched, I did not receive an e-mail from you, when in fact I have but Mail fooled me into thinking I hadn’t. You might argue this is just prioritizing simplicity—error messages are ugly, they confuse and upset lay users, but BAD SIMPLICITY IS JUST CHEAPING OUT. 1/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller Apple, when it cares to, is the master of developing ways to reconcile simplicity with function — LIKE MAKING ACTIVE KEY SHORTCUTS BLACK, INACTIVE ONES GRAY. 1980s Apple invested a great deal, tried lots of variations, before settling on that UI convention they’ve now abandoned and destroyed. Apple could develop ways of communicating the actual status of mail searches to users without just spitting scary log messages at them. BUT IT WOULD MEAN WORK, FOCUS, EXPENSE. 2/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller With Mail, Apple (1) eliminated the ability to decide what columns you wish to appear in the layout; and (2) eliminated the ability to search for what doesn’t appear. Very often, I want to search mails only with attachments, to find some file that was sent to me or I sent. It used to be easy in Apple Mail. Now it is impossible. I have to go to my mail provider’s web app. 3/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller You can no longer straightforwardly toggle to flag messages by clicking where the flag appears. On the Mac there’s a key shortcut, I think, but otherwise and on the phone you have to go through a menu then explicitly choose a color. Mail clients have done flagging since the mid 90s and defaulted to red. Apple just eliminated that, defying decades of habit. Flagging is now far less “simple”. 4/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller These are choices they make because iPhone became their flagship product, they embarked on a project to unify apps on the Mac to better resemble iPhone apps, regardless of what it does to functionality on the desktop. iPhoto was a much more capable app than iPhone-ported Photos, but “consistency” wins out. 5/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller They could invest to make apps consistent at limited functionality on the desktop but include more for serious work, but they just don’t, because in a very narrow sense, it doesn’t pencil. I am mad that Apple destroyed years of organizational work in iPhoto and Aperture and replaced it all with lobotomized Photos, but I’m still stuck on the ecosystem and unifying the codebase was cheap and consistent, so financially wasn’t it the right choice for them? 6/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller But if DoJ does its work, next time they pull shit like that I won’t stick. Then all of a sudden it will pencil for them to give a fuck again. /fin

@jjoelson @matthewstoller I think you are seriously mistaken. I’ve been an Apple user for more than 40 years. Once upon a time, you could argue that many Apple decisions derived from a principled devotion to simplicity. I remember when Apple User Interface Guidelines were like holy writ. 1/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller Apple hasn’t given a F about that for years, has constantly violated the principles it once established. Have you noticed ALL keyboard shortcuts ate gray in current MacOS, when once they installed black vs grey provide information, feedback about available functions, as a key piece of the simplicity and consistency of the GUI Apple pioneered “for the rest of us”? 2/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller Do you think Apple intentionally enshittifies Mail as “simplification” to make room for pro options? E-mail is commodified, with nearly all users using platform defaults or mail-provider webapps like gmail. There’s no “pro” ecosystem. Sure, there are a few apps on the app store that barrly eke a living despite how crappy mail is backed mostly by independent devs, but nothing remotely competed witu cross-device, built-in Mail. It’s just not a priority. 3/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller Or how about Photos. Not only does Apple not invest in Photos, it (1) ensures that 90%+ of pictures Apple users take end up on iCloud by making that the only safe and convenient place Camera to deposit photos and (2) DENIES 3RD PARTIES access to iCloud photos, so no “pro” apps can compete with photos. If you want a randomly shuffles slide show, you have to use a effing SCREENSAVER, because that’s an Apple app that supports it. Photos does not. 4/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller There are 3rd party slideshow apps. YOU HAVE TO DUPLICATIVELY EXPORT whatever album you want to shuffle — don’t try this with your whole library or a smart album that curates your whole library — into a folder, because the apps are FORBIDDEN BY APPLE from hitting Photo libraries that are effectively system services. 5/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller Apple simultaneously insists that Photos libraries belong exclusively to it (because they are a huge source of platform stickiness), and doesn’t bother to invest in the Photo functionality it offers users. Apple doesn’t care because Apple doesn’t have to. It has market power. 6/

@jjoelson @matthewstoller The quote refers explicity to “good enough”, not “simple”, and to the expense of what might exceed good enough. Sure, maybe DoJ is taking the quote out of context, I can’t say. I can say, as a ling suffering Apple user, I sure didn’t need DoJ to tell me that Apple has been abusing its market power for a very long time. /fin

@BenRossTransit @MisuseCase As the piece does describe, it is a joint Hamas-Likud project. Or perhaps Likud-Hamas.

I mostly agree with this author’s analysis, but I wonder why he does not also argue that support for Likud should be hate speech outside the bounds of socially tolerable norms if support for Hamas should be. 1/

@BenRossTransit @MisuseCase (I’m more “free-speech absolutist” than the author, so I’d place neither out of bounds. But it strikes me as bad faith an bad analysis to not follow the implications of how collaborative and symmetrical the joint Hamas-Likud project has been.) /fin

@djc @walruslifestyle @clacke i think boosters overstate its current significance. yes, stronger wage growth at the bottom in percentage terms, and therefore some compression of "wage inequality". but in dollar terms, stronger wage growth at the bottom doesn't translate to more actual income growth at the bottom. and the upspiraling asset economy is an inequality and predation machine.

@djc @walruslifestyle @clacke also, at a perceptual level, the degree to which wages are ground down by inflation seems much higher at the bottom than the top. 1/

@djc @walruslifestyle @clacke high earners see nominal growth of the portfolios by the nominal dollars they save. smaller growth in their overall income translates to high percentage growth relative to the subset of monthly inflation-affected expenses. lower-income people see higher wages eaten completely by expenditures, buying surprisingly little more than lower wages did before. /fin