>Fundamentally, I disagree with the assertion that because a minor consumer purchase goes south and charges an unarguably illegal processing fee (for interchange) now deemed legal for hardware providers that the usual moral justification for this, consumer welfare, is harmed as the BATNA is simple - get a different maker's phone. Varying qualities of substitutes are easily attainable.

Honestly we may just have to agree to disagree. Both from my own personal experience helping friends and family as well as professional experience working in IT the act of switching away from apple is always an incredibly stressful and more often than not a significantly disruptive event for the user.

A good example here is the elderly. The energy and effort that goes into learning how to use a new phone is significant for most people 70+ and a huge factor when they're trying to decide to upgrade or switch their current phone. Very often, this daunting task is legitimately not worth it for them even if it that means letting apple take advantage of them simply because they don't think or truly know that they don't have the bandwidth to take on learning another smart phone.

Here you have a vulnerable class of people who just can't simply switch over to another OS even when they have the means, ripe for financial abuse. Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company and governments ought to be doing whatever needs to be done to protect the millions of people who are functionally stuck using their platform from being abused.

In regards to the rest of your comment I don't feel knowledgeable enough to comment. All I really wanted to say is:

(a) millions of people are negatively impacted by this to the benefit of a small few.

(b) a huge majority of those people likely aren't aware that they're being taken advantage of and even if they did, a meaningful amount of them couldn't do much about it without some help and/or incurring considerable amounts of stress throughout the switch.

(c) What Apple is doing here is exactly the behavior I believe governments ought to be trying to prevent.