That’s how the law works. For example nvidia is in hot water for the way they treat their partners: restrictions on what they can make, bundling of products, e

That’s how the law works. For example nvidia is in hot water for the way they treat their partners: restrictions on what they can make, bundling of products, etc. Really a lot of the same stuff as intel and AMD did back in the late 90s/early 2010s with locking down their chipsets etc to force third parties out of the market (although this was never really enforced at the time). Then contrast apple: apple has never sold individual components to partners in the first place. They will not sell you a M1 processor, only a whole MacBook or tablet. And that’s perfectly legal and not anticompetitive at all, actually. What’s the difference? Intel and Nvidia allowed partners to enter this niche, and then crowded them out later. Apple never allowed anyone to enter this niche in the first place. So there’s no actual harm to partners or market competitiveness - there was never a market in the first place. The former is actually legally much worse than the latter - it’s perfectly legal to just sell a phone and not the chips. Think of it like “promissary estoppel” for business relationships. If you make a promise (even a verbal one) and someone else incurs an expense based on that promise, and you renege, you are on the hook for damages because of the money they spent based on your promise! Anticompetiveness is very similar in a sense. If you don’t allow third parties to enter the space, there is no harm to market competitiveness, because there is no market. Once other companies spend billions of dollars to try and enter the market, you can’t just kick them out after the fact. Kicking them out is in fact less fair than never letting them enter in the first place - because letting them enter means they incur R&D expenses etc. That’s a direct harm in a way which “I can’t make a MacBook competitor because they won’t sell me chips!” really isn’t. (leaving aside the mac clone era, which occurred when apple was so small and frankly almost collapsing that there was no actual argument they construed a monopoly or damaged overall market competitiveness at the time)