>> Apple should not have the right to enforce those conditions to begin with

Apple is not a state-owned company. They can do whatever they like, and you can choose to support them by purchasing their stock and/or their products. You can choose not to support them by purchasing neither their stock or their products.

There are several federal and state laws that define what they "can not do", and this isn't one of them. Why should a business owner(s) "not have the right" to run their business any way they see fit, so long as they do not violate the law?

Your analogy to MS doesn't hold water - MS was told not to do something by a governing authority, and they did it anyway. The governing authority stepped in and enforced their rules - nothing out of the ordinary there.

> They can do whatever they like

Thats not really true. There are a multitude of anti monopoly laws and consumer protections that may apply to Apple's actions.

> Why should a business owner(s) "not have the right" to run their business any way they see fit

Because one company having too much market power, and being in an oligopoly type situation is bad.

Because we have consumer protection laws for a reason.

Because when a consumer buys a device, they have the legal right to do whatever the heck they want with it, and Apple tried, and failed, to sue consumers for doing things to devices that the consumer owns.

The courts have sided quite a few times in favor of consumers, regarding how they have the legal right to do what they want with devices that they own.

And if the current laws don't 100% cover this situation that we are in right now, then hopefully the law will be reinterpreted to apply to it.

But even beyond that, it makes perfect sense to criticize, and retaliate against, companies that hurt consumers, and try to take away their rights.

Apple is a chief offending, in just how many bad things that they have done, to try to take away consumer's legal rights to doing what they want with devices that the consumer owns. They tried, and failed, to sue people. This deserves to be criticized, and retailiated against.

You are moving the goalposts. If you want to argue for regulation in this area feel free, but to date that regulation doesn't exist.

Why should they not have the right to enforce the terms of their own service? They own it, the operate it. It's theirs to do with as they wish.

Your comment might make sense of Apple were some sort of government entity, but it isn't; it was completely Facebook and Google's decision to abide by Apple's terms and conditions, something that will have been pored over by legal team upon legal team. This is not something Facebook or Google will have entered into lightly, and yet they explicitly chose to break the terms and conditions.

If I run a restaurant and one of the house rules is that you're not allowed to harass my staff and make the dining experience unpleasant for other customers, and you do that, of course I'm well within my rights to throw you out.

The difference is that Apple are controlling what software individuals can run on their own phones that they paid good money for.

The problem isn't that Apple are allowed to throw Google out of the enterprise program; the problem is that Apple users aren't allowed to install Google's apps without Apple's permission.

It's fair enough to say that Google can't complain because they knew the terms of the enterprise agreement. But I'm not sure it's fair to say that Apple phone purchasers are clearly told when they buy a phone that Apple can disable their employer's internal apps.

> The difference is that Apple are controlling what software individuals can run on their own phones that they paid good money for.

Maybe, except that the enterprise app distribution system is a service provided by Apple. It has associated terms and conditions.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I don't think it's the argument to be making right now; if the topic were jailbreaking, sure. As it is, it's about abusing a service. The enterprise app distribution system is not sideloading in the same sense as it is on Android; it is a service for a specific purpose.

> But I'm not sure it's fair to say that Apple phone purchasers are clearly told when they buy a phone that Apple can disable their employer's internal apps

For the individual employees, no, they probably don't know this. However, they have no real need to know; this is an implementation detail on the employer's end.

The employers 100% know about this, or else they wouldn't agree to the terms and conditions of the enterprise app distribution system. Legal teams will have pored over this. Nobody is ignorant of the implications of their actions; it just happened to be that two high-profile companies made the mistake of thinking they were immune to punishment.

But no, any company involved in the enterprise app distribution system knows 100% what getting that certificate revoked means. Especially a tech company!

> Why should they not have the right to enforce the terms of their own service? They own it, the operate it. It's theirs to do with as they wish.

Because they became too big. It's the right of e.g. the EU to allow them to operate. Or better said, the law could be changed to disallow operation if certainy conditions are not met. Apple then has the choice to either adapt or leave the EU market.

But Apple isn't a monopoly, and it never will be.

You're talking like the EU has one set of rules for companies from its members and another for others, but that isn't the case. The EU treats all monopolies equally; Apple isn't close to a monopoly.

Of the actors involved here, Google is the one that the EU is most concerned about.

Apple is only acting on their own turf, their services. Their reach is not far spread outside of the iOS landscape, heavily dwarfed by Google's Android at something like 85% share.

There are not only monopoly rules. It seems plausible to me that there could be a rule that mobile phone/computer ecosystems above a certain threshold must grant access to the platform (under reasonable conditions).

That would be the EU going beyond their reach, invading into private business practices, something more akin to the Soviet Union than the EU. Apart from that, "size" means nothing and is completely arbitrary; the EU has only ever really chased monopolies and companies that flout EU regulations and taxation. Let's stop injecting our own ideologies into what we'd like some state or other to do; we should never want any kind of government to regulate that heavily.

This is a pretty poor argument. I can think of multiple reasons they should be able to immediately revoke a certificate (or an app) 1. It finds the certificate has been compromised 2. it finds a publisher introduced malware in an update to their app

If some app decides to include a crypto-miner, that burns up your battery, your sure going to want apple to yank that from all the phones, as quick as possible, not sit there an hope your pocket doesn't melt before you can figure out which app to uninstall.

Microsoft was a monopoly. Apple has a very strong competitor. That's the difference.