> You can switch vendors any time (e.g. to Samsung, LG, Google, or any other Android/Microsoft variants)

You'll have to dig yourself back out of the vendor lock-in in order to do so. If you have an Apple device and you use an Apple credit card, switching to Android means changing your credit card and changing your subscriptions. It means different compatibility rules between devices, it means different app availability. Sometimes it means giving up related services that are not available on other platforms (almost like the switching costs inherent in bundling services together is part of what this debate is about).

Of course, you can do all that. But you can also emigrate between countries in many cases. The EU and US will allow you to move someplace else if you want to. It'll be expensive, it might be prohibitively expensive, there might be large switching costs and things you have to give up -- but that's just another system of vendor lock-in. The United States will not (generally) say that it's illegal for you to move to France.

And note that with Apple in particular, Apple has the resources to move out of countries if it wants to. Apple is not a single family struggling to make ends meet that can't afford legal advice on how to exit a market. Apple is one of the richest companies in the world. If Apple doesn't want to be part of the EU market, Apple has the freedom to walk away from that market -- and in fact, corporations have done this before, they have exited markets over policy. There are few companies in the world where participation in a market is more of a choice than it is with Apple.

To say that developers have a choice about which ecosystems they work with but that Apple doesn't have a choice about whether it does business in the EU... it's just wildly inconsistent. Oh, Apple would have to give up a lot of revenue, sure. But I wonder if developers making a decision about whether to support iOS have ever faced that conundrum? ;)

I'll concede that the scale is different, but there is no bright line here that makes vendor lock-in fundamentally different, you're just quibbling over where to draw a line on a continuum. And it's a lot simpler and more accurate to the real world to just say, "yes, governments can impose more switching cost but that doesn't mean that switching costs and the concept of coercion stop existing outside of governments." People like to pretend that the extreme power of governments and the extreme danger of government overreach means that they're fundamentally the only system of coercion and that means that markets are always pure expressions of free choice, and it's just obviously not true.

Governments are coercive and are often coercive on a level beyond the market. There is a reason why we care more about freedom of speech as applied to the government than as applied to businesses. Scale matters. But scale is not the same as a binary system. The fact that government has more tools at its disposal to coerce people does not mean that the market (or Apple) has none.

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> Given the size of Facebook's userbase and its revenue growth over many years, most people don't care about the tracking that goes on there.

And yet, when offered the choice when booting up Facebook on iOS, many users chose to disable tracking. Why? I thought we knew their preference. How do we explain this difference in behavior if using Facebook is an expression of approval over how users are tracked? Are we supposed to believe that all of those users suffered concussions and then suddenly became not OK with the tracking anymore?

It's one thing to say that consumers are choosing to opt into a system, but here we have an example of consumers literally demonstrating two separate choices in opposite directions. So it just doesn't make sense to act like using Facebook means users like being tracked when we have extremely clear signals that those same users immediately opted out of being tracked as soon as they had the opportunity to do so.

The only way to explain that behavior is to say that their usage of Facebook did not provide a clear indicator on their preferences on privacy/tracking and that their decision to use Facebook was a complicated decision based on multiple factors and was not some kind of full endorsement of Facebook's business model.

Sure, but that's not the case with Apple. There are a number of smartphone manufacturers (even 'Android' isn't one category - there are many variants) and there aren't many laws preventing new entries into the market that can be sustained by potentially happy customers.

It's not like governments (which also have a monopoly on legal violence, something no corporation has) or political parties at all.

Very good point.

To be clear, I'm not saying that Apple is the same as Putin; there's different kinds of "voting" in any government system. But I really like the way you phrase that: "consolidation of product categories" is a really good description of how Apple's ecosystem works, and it's clear (to me at least) that this consolidation is purposeful and deliberate; Apple wants iOS to be a composite product that is all-or-nothing. And you're completely right that both votes and purchases are often at best decisions about the entire composite ecosystem as a whole and not about the individual parts of those ecosystems.

The consequence is that once consumers are in a place where there are only a few choices about ecosystems that actually make sense to use, there's no longer pressure to change the parts that people don't like as long as the overall ecosystem still remains better than the alternatives. In the same way that single-issue voting allows parties to pass otherwise unpopular policies in other areas, products can excel in specific important areas that allow companies to ignore other flaws and criticisms in other areas. It's very easy for markets to hit local maximums where having a clear market winner in a particular category removes any incentive for the market to otherwise improve, because improving those areas would require at least temporarily moving away from the current best choice.