What probably harms consumers the most is that companies with large purses have an outsized influence on policy and typically write their own regulations that serve to generate additional profit and make it difficult for new entrants to the market to emerge. You don't need to have a monopoly for that, just a good old fasioned colluding industry and a politician who cares more about their individual wealth than the collective good of their electorate that they represent.

You're right that the analogy was not quite right.

Here's a better one. Facebook creates a virtual world where 50% of the population choose. Apple creates a different virtual world which the other 50% choose.

If you simply look at the boundary/entrance you can say there's freedom of choice. But whether you choose apple or Facebook, there's 0 competition once you're inside that world.

Further, once you've established a home and connections within one world, switching to the other becomes quite expensive.

Competition at the gates, monopoly within.

I might add that this is very similar to the concept of company scrip whereby the local coal mine had a monopoly over local jobs and gouged workers for basic necessities. Absolutely you could have moved a town over, but the cost to do so was deemed too high in many cases.

When cost of switching is high, monopolistic power can be enforced upon customers. It's a similar situation with a lot of SaaS who have pricing power to strong arm their customers into high margins due to the cost of switching to alternative technologies. In a truly competitive market, SaaS margins should be close to 0. Obviously that's not the case today.

Regulation will catch up to all of these tricks, just a question of the timeline. Capitalism only works well when there's an environment of competition, and leveraging high costs of switching or large gated systems to enable profit margins well beyond what a competitive market would bear is antithetical to this concept.

That's why antitrust law is so important, and needs to evolve to handle modern business structures.

That’s not really it though, HN like most websites are 100% HN once your inside their walled garden. That’s the normal situation, nobody complains because McDonalds happy meals only contain toys sourced by McDonalds. In the past it’s only monopolies where companies dominate positions gave them leverage that was an issue, otherwise consumer choice was upfront and that worked.

Xbox, iOS, and Windows are platforms that also provide basic utility where third parties are part of the basic product. It’s by owning a platform they gain some control over that relationship between consumers and those other companies. Such complex relationships aren’t completely new, malls are gatekeepers for the stores within. But, such relations are normally heavily regulated.

The obvious difference is the scale. Sometimes difference in scale is difference in nature.

All of what you listed are easily substituted, and not very impactful to somebody's life.

The same games exist on Xbox and Playstation (95% overlap). McDonald's is a buy one time product, where you can easily choose on a given day to go to BK or Wendy's. You buy an iphone, you aren't going to just buy an Android the next day if Apple raises costs. Isn't it obvious how different these are?

You can bet that if Microsoft charged any third party apps on windows 30% of their revenue they would have been regulated long ago. You really think otherwise?

I don't understand the Apple defenders. Encouraging actual competition within the platform is the pro business stance. Competition is the basic element that makes capitalism work.

You don't have competition if cost of switching is high, it's that simple.

Platforms with sufficient impact on people's lives, and sufficiently high cost of switching will be regulated to require competition. It's as simple as that, though fanboys will kick and scream for the next few years until it passes into law. It's the obvious outcome, and china is already paving the way on legislation.