Look, kids! It’s a poor, little trillion dollar mega corporation. Everybody wave!
Meanwhile, walled gardens remain perfectly legal, unless you explicitly change the law.
Look at Microsoft, which created and marketed Xbox as a walled garden with no legal repercussions in the decades since.
However, Microsoft created Windows as an open platform, and then used anticompetitive tactics to retain control (just as Google did) and was found just as guilty as Google in the courts.
When Apple created iOS it was a closed platform. When they added the ability to create third party native apps they were clear that the platform would be a walled garden.
It clearly was not a closed platform in the way that Apple believed. It never should have been closed. I own my devices, so I get to decide what they run. It’s my electricity driving the chips, so I decide which bits get flipped. Simple as.
I do hear you, I just don’t know if I have the same perception of the facts on the ground. Google and Apple should be compelled to support users’ decisions about whether to defer to the corporate overlords, or not.
That's not how the law works.
As long as the device creator is absolutely clear to consumers that choosing their platform means that consumers will be buying into a walled garden, it's perfectly legal.
The only way to change that is to change the law, as the EU did.
