Mr. Cook, Tear Down That Walled Garden (Premium)

Apple’s antitrust woes in the US and Europe are being mischaracterized by its legions of ardent fans, and the misinformed who believe that Apple and other Big Tech firms should be allowed to continue their ongoing abuses of consumers, developers, competitors, and partners. But the truth is out there.
I’ve previously discussed how personal technology’s dominant platform makers—Apple, Google, and Microsoft—use anticompetitive business practices to maintain their monopolies, behavior that’s illegal in both the U.S. and EU. But Apple is unique among its peers in two ways: It actively works to thwart technology stacks like the web that threaten its App Store empire on mobile, and it incessantly and successfully markets its anticompetitive behavior as being good for consumers.
Consumer harm weighs heavily in any antitrust discussion, and it’s as central to any antitrust case as market definition. It’s also as misunderstood as the term monopoly, which many incorrectly believe is tied to some specific market share percentage. And that’s because dominant monopolists, like Apple today or Microsoft in the late 1990s, are so adept at a debate strategy that, while curiously effective, amounts to nothing more than misdirection. It’s a sleight of hand.
Consider the central debate of US v. Microsoft, that the software giant was so intent on destroying Netscape Navigator, because of the threat that an open web platform posed to Windows, that it artificially integrated its own web browser, Internet Explorer (IE), into the operating system. Evidence showed that this strategy was employed solely to harm Netscape: Microsoft's internal emails couldn't have been more damning. And from our 2024 viewpoint, we can identify this action as an early, almost prototypical, form of enshittification because Microsoft undermined the security and reliability of Windows, thus harming its own customers, to protect the profits it derived from its ecosystem from a new rival. But that is not how Microsoft marketed this work, which it described as integration that would provide its customers with a more seamless web experience.
I’ve made this argument before, and I’ll probably have to keep making it, given how unreceptive some are to basic facts. But there’s nothing mutually exclusive about Microsoft, in this case, making a product design decision that both helps and hurts customers. Microsoft, like any Big Tech company today, can be, and is, both good and bad. With IE, there were some customer advantages to the integration of Windows and IE. But there were also disadvantages. And, of course, illegal intent to subvert the market. The question for antitrust regulators, then as now, is to determine whether behavior is illegal. And then it is on the courts to hear the arguments and issue a legal ruling on that behavior.
Apple is employing the same rationale in its defense of its business practices today. This is smart for many reasons, but mostly because...