There’s no metric by which Apple has a cell phone monopoly. Samsung makes more total phones than they do, to say nothing of all of the other Android brands, and makes at least a comparable number of high-end phones. Apple is certainly one of the big players, but there are a lot of others.
I don’t really want to get bogged down in that argument, so I will concede that point.
How about the others? If Microsoft had a monopoly, and there’s no incentive for monopolists to improve their products, why did Windows keep getting better for decades? Why does Apple keep shipping better watches?
My answer is: tech monopolies are inherently fragile and don’t provide nearly as much strong arm power as monopolies of the past did. That wasn’t obvious in the 1990s, but is obvious now.
Apple has a monopoly on phones that run IOS (and on computer that run MacOS), but that’s pretty much a tautology. I think that is what people mean when they talk about Apple having a monopoly. They can’t imagine using something different, so they’re only choice is Apple.
Saying that the dire monopolistic predictions of the 90s turned out false, after action was taken to prevent those predictions from coming true is a bit of circular logic. If nothing had been done to slow down Microsoft’s attempted takeover of the web, and it still failed, then that might be a sign that tech monopolies aren’t possible. But that is not what happened. Microsoft attempted to use their desktop monopoly to takeover the web. The lawsuit scared them, and they backed off. Because the web remained free and open, Microsoft’s desktop monopoly was irrelevant to the development of the web, and they eventually lost the browser wars, which made takeover of the web impossible. The war was not about which browser people used, that was only the first battle.
On some levels tech monopolies can be easy to subvert. All that’s required for Google to lose it’s search monopoly is for people to switch in droves to some other search platform. No massive infrastructure changes are required, just that people start typing newmagicsearchthing.com into their browser. Much of Google’s monopoly is in things consumers don’t see, like ad networks.
The problem comes with things like regulatory capture, and poor regulations that insure only large entrenched players can comply with legal requirements. For example, the non-requirement requirement in Europe that websites have something like Google’s ContentID to identify copyrighted works as they are uploaded. A large barrier has been placed in front of any upstart competitor to youtube, because first they will have to invest the massive amount of money to develop their own ContentID system.
The biggest area of tech monopoly in the US, and one that absolutely cannot be easily routed around is that of local broadband infrastructure. People in the US are very lucky to have one good choice for Internent, while most people have one marginal choice and maybe a second poor alternative.
Again, Microsoft is not the only example. Google tried to use its search and email monopoly to dethrone Facebook. Didn’t work. Google and Apple both give away free versions of Office-like software. Office remains dominant.
I don’t agree with this interpretation of history on Microsoft either. I don’t believe that Microsoft made significant changes in strategy in response to the lawsuit. Microsoft fought the lawsuit to a pretty minor settlement that didn’t prevent them from bundling any software with Windows, and IE reached its maximum marketshare years after the lawsuit and still had by far the largest share when the terms of the settlement expired. Microsoft didn’t lose the browser wars because of a lawsuit. They lost them because IE wasn’t a very good browser. Obviously, we don’t have a universe where the DoJ didn’t sue Microsoft to compare. But we do have a universe where the DoJ didn’t go after any other tech company trying to do something similar, and most of them have failed too!