Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Apple, too

Elizabeth Warren apparently knows very little about Apple; she&#x27;s making a random and meaningless recommendation based in ignorance.<p>Her rationale for breaking up Apple is &quot;you’ve got to break it apart from their App Store. It’s got to be one or the other. Either they run the platform or they play in the store.&quot;<p>But Apple mostly doesn&#x27;t &quot;play in the store.&quot; Aside from Final Cut and Logic Pro, they sell virtually no products in the app store.<p>All the apps that Apple sells combined together amount to a <i>tiny</i> fraction of one percent of Apple&#x27;s revenues. It&#x27;s probably not even one-tenth of one percent. Apple doesn&#x27;t care at all about this revenue. I&#x27;m not sure why Elizabeth Warren cares about it. They could spin their apps off into a separate company, like they did with Claris years ago, but I doubt they&#x27;d even bother; they&#x27;d either just kill the products or, more likely, give them away for free. (Unless Warren thinks Apple shouldn&#x27;t be able to provide free software to users, in which case she should really stop while she&#x27;s not too far behind.)

Breaking up the tech giants is not a solution to the problems that confront us. Legislation about our rights to digital privacy and related issues are; I hope the powers that be work on that instead of this sound-byte friendly &quot;let&#x27;s break &#x27;em up&quot; approach. A 2-person company could compromise your privacy just as easily as a 2-trillion dollar company.

This is an interview that goes into more depth about Warren’s proposal. Only a few questions are about Apple; the rest further elucidate her reasoning behind the proposal as a whole.

Using a metric such as revenue is too simplistic. There are some concerns about power over competitors, consumers, etc., but arbitrarily setting the measure af revenue of X per year (plus inflationary adjustment of whatever) is not the way to go about it, but maybe this is a ruse to get a constituency excited and doesn’t really mean it.<p>I do believe some of thd giants have too much leverage but I don’t see anything magical about $25BB&#x2F;year.

Looking forward to living in a world that&#x27;s dominated by Chinese tech companies who can compete on a global scale without their governments trying to actively undermine them.

I honestly do not understand who she is trying to please: tech is not banking (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Separation_of_investment_and_retail_banking" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Separation_of_investment_and_r...</a> ). There is no systemic risk or too-big-to-fail risk for the government.<p>Also, she would make the US companies considerably weaker against the chaebols (Samsung) and Chinese competitors having the same but more agressive strategy. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessofapps.com&#x2F;guide&#x2F;app-stores-list&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessofapps.com&#x2F;guide&#x2F;app-stores-list&#x2F;</a>

is this going to solve anything?<p>sounds like cutting down a tree when it gets too big rather than preventing it growing like that...<p>i&#x27;m quite sure companies like google, apple, facebook, etc. are creative enough to find a way to get around this restriction which will just ensure a false sense of security.<p>i get the whole monopoly and fair competition issues, but haven&#x27;t there been rules and regulations for those for quite a while?<p>apart from that: how realistic is this scenario to get actual laws enforing it when those same companies are pretty much funding the government?

While everyone else covered the main topic, there is one aspect of her proposal I disagree with; preventing the platform owners from selling&#x2F;offering said apps on the said platform. (I could be misunderstanding Warren on this, please correct me if I&#x27;m wrong on this).<p>Software&#x2F;hardware integration is a good thing, not a bad thing. Safari and Edge remains the most efficient browsers on their platforms because the platform owners know the deeper levels, they&#x27;re the most experienced and they&#x27;re in place to optimize both the software and hardware.<p>Now, one could say that the said platform owners must open up the APIs fully (which I have no problem with as long as it doesn&#x27;t violate any security &#x2F; privacy issues), so other browsers could be just as efficient but how would the platform owners know how to improve if they don&#x27;t try it first?<p>Everything else, I kinda agree with. I would love to see all platforms require a separation&#x2F;firewall between the platform owners and App Store but mainly because it allows customers the ability to use other tools that is not normally available with sideloading other App Stores and also other OSes (maybe?)

Would consumers benefit from this? What businesses are lobbying for this?

I’ve read her proposal and actually it sounds pretty exciting to me. I wonder where AWS fits into all of this

If we are talking about breaking tech monopolies, how about comcast? You can break up google and apple and Amazon, but I still only have one real choice for the internet connection I use to access them. I believe this is true for about 80% of americans.

I don&#x27;t like the breakup idea, but I like the idea of threatening the big tech companies, even crudely, so as to extort more R&amp;D from firms that may eventually revert to the low-investment, high divident BigCo norm when founders die&#x2F;retire. Government contracting is corrupt and government agencies are not always good at productization and other stages of research<p>BigCos combine the state&#x27;s giant revenues and scale with the private sector&#x27;s personnel discipline and agility. Breakup and civil settlement threats may effectively cajol firms into buying the goodwill of the state through breakthroughs that please voters and increase US power in the international system

Frankly I don&#x27;t see what the point of breaking up Apple would be. Where&#x27;s the monopoly potential&#x2F;barrier to entry in the markets Apple is serving? They have quite viable competitors in pretty much all of them. I think a bit of well-designed regulation would go a lot further here, especially around right-to-repair (and &quot;right to keep older hardware going after it loses support&quot;) and general platform openness for things like the App store.

Breaking up giant commercial monoliths is essential creative destruction for the economy. They&#x27;re not going to do it themselves. It&#x27;s not a question of whether they&#x27;re going to break up, it&#x27;s only a question of when. I hope it happens sooner rather than later because I want to live in the Brave New World where dozens of services have to compete for the markets left behind.

She has a point. Apple has a competitive advantage over others as it makes the rules it enforces. If critical change comes to the App store then Apple can make changes to their apps before the change is announced to everybody else. That&#x27;s a conflict of interest which creates unfair business advantage.

I think in principle it’s a good thing to avoid having companies that are very big. These giants are not very innovative compared to their size so having multiple smaller competitors is probably healthy.<p>Breaking up large companies may be a form of “creative destruction “. Maybe there are other ways to accomplish this big I am convinced that very large companies are not good for a market economy.

Her political stances are going the extreme route. These ideas on breaking tech companies has literally no well thought merit, at least from Warren.<p>How exactly is Apple a monopoly? Because they have an App Store? They don’t really sell products in there other than maybe Final Cut Pro. So is the issue that no company should be able to set the terms of what it allows in its App Store? What’s the legal basis here? How is this detrimental to society or even just the US?<p>This sounds more like Warren might be getting bankrolled by Apples competitors (best case) or she’s completely clueless about how business or economics works, completely ignorant of who Apple competes with (it’s an international market, recall Samsung), etc.<p>It was the same nonsense the other day about breaking up Amazon. I asked then and I’ll ask again - by what metric are they a monopoly? Is warren going to break up WalMart and every other business that established a store brand?<p>No of course not. This is nonsense, pandering to the fringes of the left, much like Trump panders to the racists, intolerance folks on the right.<p>I don’t think her campaign is going to go anywhere, and if anything, she’s ruining her credibility. I want Trump gone in 2020, but I don’t want to replace one dangerous loon with another.

Yes please. All monopolies are damaging to consumers, capitalism and democracy. Please do away with as many as possible. The only notable exceptions are business areas where the physical constraints force a single company to operate, like sanitation and sewage.