Here is a good piece from Cory Doctorow. It's funny in the context of two huge companies arguing over consumer benefit over App Store margins and Fortnite. I wish others would think about it. Shamelessly I'm going to block quote 4 of these paragraphs, but recommend reading the entire piece.

"Then came a fabulist named Robert Bork, a former solicitor general who Reagan appointed to the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and who had created an alternate legislative history of the Sherman Act and its successors out of whole cloth. Bork insisted that these statutes were never targeted at monopolies (despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, including the transcribed speeches of the acts’ authors) but, rather, that they were intended to prevent “consumer harm” — in the form of higher prices.

Bork’s theories were especially palatable to the same power brokers who backed Reagan, and Reagan’s Department of Justice and other agencies began to incorporate Bork’s antitrust doctrine into their enforcement decisions (Reagan even put Bork up for a Supreme Court seat, but Bork flunked the Senate confirmation hearing so badly that, 40 years later, D.C. insiders use the term “borked” to refer to any catastrophically bad political performance).

Little by little, Bork’s theories entered the mainstream, and their backers began to infiltrate the legal education field, even putting on junkets where members of the judiciary were treated to lavish meals, fun outdoor activities, and seminars where they were indoctrinated into the consumer harm theory of antitrust (emphasis mine -x.). The more Bork’s theories took hold, the more money the monopolists were making — and the more surplus capital they had at their disposal to lobby for even more Borkian antitrust influence campaigns.

The history of Bork’s antitrust theories is a really good example of the kind of covertly engineered shifts in public opinion that Zuboff warns us against, where fringe ideas become mainstream orthodoxy. But Bork didn’t change the world overnight. He played a very long game, for over a generation, and he had a tailwind because the same forces that backed oligarchic antitrust theories also backed many other oligarchic shifts in public opinion. For example, the idea that taxation is theft, that wealth is a sign of virtue, and so on — all of these theories meshed to form a coherent ideology that elevated inequality to a virtue."

There is a certain sleazy feel when someone like Tim Sweeney posits everyone down the line, smaller devs and consumers, would benefit from the monopolistic break-up that is badly needed in this area, but like many executives he tells consumers they should have faith prices go down with competition. Meanwhile these corporations have an incomprehensible amount of money by which they can forward their agendas. For example Epic has such deep pockets and time to be nimble they can create marketing materials in anticipation or within hours of pushing their agenda and tripping the App Store trap.

Also both companies have the ability to play a long game here as well, it will be well into 2021 before any of this will be resolved. Plenty of time for both to make a case with the public for months and encouraging "fringe ideas into the mainstream orthodoxy".

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59