Apple fights to keep DOJ antitrust suit from reaching trial

I see apple as like LVMH, but for phones. It has a minority of overall sales, but a majority of the “luxury” part of the market. This gives them influence over the whole market, but not a real monopoly.

It's strange how they've convinced people that, considering there's nothing at all luxurious about their products, not even the price...

What's luxurious about Apple products is that they tend to respect your time

Does your time feel respected when you're leaving the Kindle app to open a web browser, search for the book that was next in the series, buy it, and get back to your Kindle app to continue reading ?

Ouch, this just happened to me the other day and it was irritating that Apple forces other companies to force users to do a dance

They don't force it. Amazon, for example, just doesn't want to pay the 30% platform cut. Understandable, but not force, just deterrence.

By that token no company is forced to anything.

For instance if the EU or the DOJ were to require Apple to change their policies, we could say Apple isn't forced to do so, as they still can refuse and "just" pay enormous fines until bankruptcy.

I'm not sure what we would call "force" if we take that definition.

Force of law is different than fees in a walled garden. Fines are not the same as fees. Every player that does commerce on Apple's infrastructure pays fees to do so. Fines are punishment.

While fines should be different, but in practice that line is either blurry or non existent depending on the circumstances.

For instance if Apple had to pay a global total of 2 millions of fine every year for their AppStore policy, it would be rolled in as cost of doing business and they'd keep ignoring the rulings for decades. If Amazon only had minor punishment for breaking AppSore rules they'd do it yesterday.

A binding contract is only as strong as its penalties, and in that regard we can see laws a form of contract and vice versa.