This article misses the point in that these companies have taken _active_ anticompetitive actions to intentionally crush competition; and not simply out-compete it.

This is like Microsoft adding charts to Office, and then banning anyone from installing competing chart apps on Windows unless they pay a 30% tax. Or Ford voiding your entire warranty if you install aftermarket lights (this has been clearly ruled illegal).

The simple fact that these platforms started out with these anticompetitive restrictions (because they’re smart and play the long game) doesn’t change that these are active anticompetitive actions.

Saurik’s lawsuit highlighting Apple adding contractual restrictions, preventing App Store developers from publishing on Cydia, should be a slam dunk case.

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A perfectly legitimate example of bundling is Sherlock/Finder: Apple added a feature, Sherlock wasn't limited in any way.

An illegitimate example is Screen Time: when Apple added the feature, they went on a delisting spree banning any other parental control apps.

Another (simple, easy, maybe wrong) answer might be to simply not regulate what companies do with their platforms, but limit their size.

Let them do as they please, but prevent acquisitions once they reach a certain dominance, and break them up once they exceed another level of dominance.

Of course breaking up a company is also a very messy, complicated and damaging process.

But companies would probably pre-empt a breakup by spinning of parts of their business and it may be still less harmful than the DoJ reviewing Gmail's roadmap, as Ben puts it.

If Google spun Youtube, Amazon spun AWS, Facebook spun Whatsapp and Apple spun Services, we would already be in a much healthier market without too much heavy damage.

What we lack is ambitious law makers or sensible elite.

Beyond that it is quite easy to force car makers to create modular cars with parts that fit on any car. We create standards all of the time.

Each large nation could provide a team of experts and together they could draft a plan for a digital platform to run a government on. It might be able to run on mac, windows and linux, it might require some dedicated hardware.

If the standards are open and we can all develop add-ons for it I cant see any way for it to turn sour.

It would be nice if cars actually could have user-configurable lights and such but the cost (financially, yes, but in structural change and reliability) aren’t worth it. Plus who cares any more about their car, at least enough to change any defaults? Even laptops get at most a sticker or to and that’s it.

The phones and apps are infinitely customizable, the dimensions though is user generated content. Instagrams have a standard “frame” but within that constraint (and benefiting from it) each subscriber can run free.

I actually agree that the unification of features in Google and FB is somehow wrong but, as the author says, it’s hard to draw a line dispassionately. I feel less so (also wrong but perhaps less so) about Apple, as they aren’t a majority in any market except perhaps tablets, and they make relatively few acquisitions. But because the line is so hard to draw this logic could be wrong too.

While all sensible and well reasoned I can not go along with the conclusion:

> that this is a story for methodical and well-resourced on-going regulation, not slogans and breakups. It’s a story for legislation, much more than litigation.

When it comes to break-ups let's just focus on the biggest part i.e. Google and the way the ads market is run. The argument of Dina Srinivasan (on which Warren and the case leans) is of Google's integration of functions which exist in other financial brokered markets in competition and that healthy tension drives down prices there. Car and indicator or PC and word processors are not useful analogies here.

I think the biggest problem was described pretty well in the first part.

The letters and rules were written when Apple only had 5% of market shares, and Digital / Mobile economy isn't a necessity. Now that they are 50%+ and every things requires to work Digitally to compete especially during the pandemic, those rules just cant stay the same.

Unfortunately Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs, as Jobs would probably have seen the problem. 30% on Spotify and Epic Games? Fine. But 30% of Educational / Teaching Streaming App?

Here we actually do have modular parts for cars (at least common consumables, like headlamp bulbs, are normed into a range of a handful of types which are then stocked in all service stations) Schrader valves also mean that stations only have one type of air filler (which here is also always the same: a small bottle with a tyre pressure gauge which can be carried between the refill station on the wall and your car wherever it may be)

As for ways to turn sour, I'm afraid you're underestimating humans. We can't have nice things. (Ok, we can, we at least get some nice things with something like the square root of time... but we can't have all the nice things we could have had if we weren't so prone to defection)

Can you think of any examples of the kind of effort you describe that didn't turn into a bureaucratic and extravagantly expensive mess?

"Beyond that it is quite easy to force car makers to create modular cars with parts that fit on any car."

This is by far one of the most naive things I have read in a long, long time.

As for standards: https://xkcd.com/927/