I wrote up several paragraphs, but I'll just say I'm against this. I know I'm in the minority here, but I think people and/or companies should have the right to do whatever they want with platforms (combination of hardware/software) they've created. The government stepping in at some arbitrary point and saying "Your product is so popular that you have to let everyone do whatever they want with it" is nonsense in my opinion.
The 50M threshold does seem hella arbitrary. Why is it okay for the maker of a platform with 49M users to control that platform, but as soon as they hit 50M, everything changes? It seems like the threshold is there just so the law is specifically targeted at certain companies, which…doesn't really seem like good lawmaking to me. (They might as well say "If you're named Apple or Alphabet, you must…")
I get that a lot of people here don't like this but it's sort of a central tenet of American politics that we don't punish companies
just for being successful. Even companies with actual monopoly-level market share (which the iPhone does not have) have to be found to be abusing their monopoly in order to be punished.
I'll just say as a consumer there are about a zillion things I wish congress and the DOJ would look at before side-loading apps. Like, not trying to do whataboutismhere, but can
someone maybe look at how Penguin Random House is trying to buy Simon & Schuster? That's not as sexy as going after "Big Tech" but it's literally a company buying up majority market share in a sector. It'd be like if Disney bought 20th Century, and then a few years later
also bought Sony Pictures. And it's probably going to skate right by.
I continue to note how Congress's focus seems to be on everybody but Amazon. As a consumer they're the tech giant that scares me the most. They've basically made it impossible for other online retailers to compete through decades of what was previously known as predatory pricing, they run half the internet through AWS, they have basically monopoly-level market share on ebooks, they're freaking buying MGM just because they can… And Congress doesn't ever seem to look very closely at what they do.