Legally, Apple can do pretty much what it likes on its own platform and there is nothing anybody can do about it except accept their restrictions or decline to

Legally, Apple can do pretty much what it likes on its own platform and there is nothing anybody can do about it except accept their restrictions or decline to deal with them and hope for the best with commercially viable alternatives. Someday, though, as Apple's strategy continues to unfold, and as it continues to tighten restrictions on others' ability to develop for each device, to use its dominance of one device (e.g., iPhone) to leverage market share in others (e.g., iPad), and to exert significant control over a range of devices that are nominally independent but actually inter-connected, the idea of "platform" will blur and Apple will likely have to own up to the antitrust police, just as Microsoft did with respect to the desktop OS market. I am not an antitrust lawyer and the above may in fact be naive. Instinctively, though, the apparent arrogance behind Apple's methods of throwing sharp elbows toward competitors has all the feel of what Microsoft did in the 1990s as it used its desktop OS leverage to favor MS Office/Internet Explorer, etc. and to harm independent software vendors trying to market their apps for the PC market. Ditto for IBM before that. And, while we are at it, though no two people could possibly be so different in so many ways, it would appear that Steve Jobs has drawn his competitive (or anti-competitive) inspiration right from John D. Rockefeller, who was a control freak over his markets and who often used such control in even ruthless ways to stifle competition. We are nowhere near the stage where Apple can seriously be declared a monopolist in any relevant market but Apple certainly seems bent on pushing the limit as it goes along its path on its quest for hegemony.