Large supermarket chains are absolutely a great example of monopsony power. Producers selling to the supermarket often can't choose their own price. The supermarket can decide the price, and if the producer doesn't like it, he gets to sell nothing at all, even if the actual customers do like the product. And supermarkets absolutely use this power. I've heard of supermarkets deciding to discount certain items against the wishes of the producers, but still letting the producers pay for the discount. Because the supermarket controls the distribution channel, they wield power over both the customer and the producer.

You can buy 90% of products in Walmart through other channels. ( 10% are either exclusive or own brand ) And Walmart is not the sole buyer of any of those products.

Apple is the sole buyer of All App Store Products, and you cant buy those products anywhere else. Which as far as I understand it, is what the argument Monopsony is trying to make. Buying Power instead of Market Power.

Edit: After rereading the article, the start of the article also pointed out, it was the developer that set the price of the App, not Apple. Giving them the power to price their product. Even if Apple were in this "Monopsony", it isn't really evident to me how this had harmed consumer.

Imagine a big city/country with only 2 stores, half of the population uses store A and half store B. Store A and B are happy with the profits and are not competing on the margins, both will take 30% of your products, both will ban your product if they judge they don't like it, maybe store A will block you if you compete with them and store B will block you because some algorithm. So basically you have 2 big pile of shit and you are forced to chose witch one stinks less or looks less disgusting.

Also if you think at the clients of store A and B this fake competition costs them more so the only people that benefit are the store owners, free market should always push for competition and consumer good not for making more oney then a nation. If all this crap is legal then laws need to be changed and this would include limitations for Wallmart or physical stores too.

I can remember a time when there were serious complaints about Walmart's influence in the home video market. It used to be very expensive to produce a DVD, and smaller studios couldn't afford to produce both an original widescreen and a cropped ("pan-and-scan") version for 4:3 televisions. For the longest time, Walmart would refuse to carry a title that didn't have a cropped version. It ended up forcing some to choose between losing a significant source of sales and compromising the visual quality of a film's only home video release.

The difference is that walmart actually purchase the products that they sell in their store. They are a reseller.

A more accurate comparison is a market hall which permit sellers to set up booths in return for a cut of the revenues. As an example I would look at stores around Olympics games, where the organizers holds enormous power in controlling who get to sell what, the price and the cut. The level of control they assert seems pretty similar to that of apple.

The difference is you don't purchase a Walmart store first. Neogreekisms aside, I personally think the iPhone ecosystem smells like a new kind of monopoly that the people who set down existing antitrust law couldn't have foreseen.

Imagine buying a nice desk to work on, and being told you could only buy paper and pens from the manufacturer of the desk. Maybe other vendors could be considered if 30% of their revenue went to the desk manufacturer. Preposterous, right? That's the world be live in and accepted as the norm for smartphones. Not a monopoly on a market scale, but the notion of selling someone a "platform" couldn't have really been foreseen a century ago. It's a similar idea, but it's more monopolism targeted at the market that surrounds the platform.

One particularly egregious example: Apple should reasonably be allowed to determine which products they sell on the App Store, but by preventing the installation of arbitrary apps from outside of the store, they've created a monopoly that they use for moral policing and anticompetitive practices. Apple not only disallows nudity-centric apps or apps that control nicotine vaporizers on their store, but effectively has banished them from their phones entirely. Which seems very suspect, and arguably they should not have the right to stop people from using what may be their primary computing platform as they see fit.

Then there's the issue of ebooks and music: Apple takes 30% of every in-app purchase, and developers are forbidden from using alternate payment processors to get around that. As such, Amazon can't reasonably sell ebooks in their app (you have to use a web browser and figure out the weird absence of buying capabilities yourself, as a user) since it would soak up the entire margin. Apple, however, competes with Amazon and sells ebooks themselves...which is questionable. Spotify cannot sign people up for their service without giving Apple an ongoing 30% cut of the subscription...meanwhile, Apple competes with them.

> Monopsony is a slippery concept.

How so?

If you want to buy X, and there's only one person selling X, then that person is the monopoly seller of X.

If you want to sell X, and there's only one person buying X, then that person is the monopsony buyer of X.

You can't swap the adjectives around; monopsony buyer is redundant in the same way monopoly seller is. You can think of them as the same word with different agreement forms, much like how "is" in "He is red" is the same word as "am" in "I am purple".

There's nothing slippery about that, because Walmart is already commonly given as a textbook example of monopsony.