I haven't looked into the history enough to judge whether this perception is accurate in hindsight. Like most things, I expect it's a lot messier than the popular narrative.
A patent is a government-issued monopoly.
You could say that YCombinator has a monopoly on posts to HN.
You don't need to purchase games directly from Nintendo, nor music or games or video directly from Sony, nor are Sony Videos only playable on Sony devices, nor do you have to only install Microsoft "blessed" executable for Windows.
I fail to see how saying you don't have to purchase "directly" from Nintendo matters.
FWIW, a similar setup to Playstation (you seem to have conflated Sony, which makes your point confusing considering that Sony has other subsidiaries that publish music and video). Playstation has a music and video store which will give you media DRM locked to your console.
Finally, Microsoft has an App Store which distributes "blessed" executables. There have been several editions of windows which only allow applications distributed through this store to run, such as the first iteration of the Microsoft Surface that ran ARM. There is speculation that this move is what prompted Valve to release their own Linux distribution, because Steam would be severely impacted if they no longer had an ability to run their own store.
Luckily for Valve, those limited distributions haven't made much headway.
However, my understanding is that this suite is about apple abusing the app-writing monopoly to also let only them sell apps, which is why I thought the console game analogy was sound.
As for merchants, I'm sure second hand stores and those at flea markets have signed all of these contracts. /S
Yes, I was sort-of referencing multiple arms of Sony. Sorry if that complicated things.
Yes, I know Microsoft has a blessed app storeb however, like Android, you can still install your own, unsigned executables or use another app store (there are some more recent package managers for Windows iirc? It's not really what I deal with.)
I remember the issues with the arm based surfaces. Iirc one of the current selling points of a surface ia that you can run any software on them.
I think this case will be interesting because there are platforms that come close to, but don't have quite, the control apple does over both who can generate applications as well as who can sell them. Where those platforms evolve 8s directly related to the outcome here I think.
You don’t have to buy music from Apple. Music you buy hasn’t been wrapped with DRM for a decade. You can buy movies from Google, Amazon or Vudu, download the Movies Anywhere app, connect the app to your various accounts and they automatically show up as iTunes purchases (completely legally), there is an Amazon Video, Google Play, and Vudu app available for iOS. You can go to the Amazon store in your web browser and buy a digital video just like you can buy anything else from Amazon.
We are talking about consoles. Just like the other console manufacturers, you can not sell a video game on disc that has not been approved by MS and without paying MS a licensing fee to run on the XBox.
