Apple, Its Control Over the iPhone, The Internet, And The Metaverse
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Highlights
- But just imagine, for example, how the internet might differ if it had been created by multinational media conglomerates in order to sell things, serve ads or harvest user data for profits.
- But these companies are less concerned with how the overall market grows than their share and control of this growth.
- As a result, the same companies that emerged thanks to openness tend to reject these principles where they might undermine their strategic position.
- The most important impediment today is Apple. Although no company has done more to propel the last 15 years of the internet, its policies are unlikely to produce the most prosperous overall ecosystem and do not lay a strong groundwork for the ânext Internetâ. Instead, Apple is inhibiting the growth of the future internet, while ensuring itâs designed around tolls, controls and technologies that prevent competition, prioritize the company’s profits, and lack much of what made and still makes the open web so powerful.
- To prosper, new winners must be able to emerge at every layer of the ânew economyâ and without being constrained by what a single company envisions or wants. The current situation isnât terrible â great things are happening in terms of users, creators, and innovation. But the very decisions that have made Apple so successful today also limit the number of creators that participate in the virtual economy, handicap the creativity of their products and business models, and make every transaction more expensive. Most important, it is blocking the organic evolution of the overall Internet.