Except, in reality, it largely does. There are areas where it doesn’t but the broad strokes of business and commerce are fairly well spelled out in clear terms. If they weren’t, commerce couldn’t happen. Risks wouldn’t be taken. Rewards wouldn’t exist that would be worth taking the risks and an online bookseller wouldn’t become a cloud services provider making it affordable to host a web forum for folks to post that the world shouldn’t work in the way that makes these things possible.
Yes, usually after decades of regulation and litigation. Those clear frameworks don't just fall from the sky and even then business will operate with a certain degree of risk. Sometimes more, sometimes less.
Digital markets, particularly how to respond to major platforms that are more or less locked down by the gatekeeper, are still a fairly new thing in the grand scheme of things. The App Store was introduced only roughly 14 years ago and for a significant stretch of that smartphones didn't have the role in people's lives they have today.
Your employer is focused on financial viability. It is that viability that allows them to continue paying you. If you’re not working, then someone in your inner circle is concerned with ensuring they have the financial viability to ensure that you’re able to have the electronic device (made by a company that found it financially viable to produce), the electricity (provided by a company that found it financially viable to produce and distribute electricity)… etc. etc.
The things that you are against, companies having the ability to control and profit off the products/services they produce, is the very underpinning of things like this free forum. The first Apple II didn’t exist because they just thought it’d be cool to do it. It existed because they knew that in creating it, they would get to control how it’s marketed, what features it’d have, how it’s sold, how they’d profit from it. If the government proclaimed that ALL COMPUTERS MUST BE MONOCHROME and fined Apple for having a 16 color graphics mode, we wouldn’t have the Apple that exists today.
Again, the world that exists today depends on businesses understanding what’s required to take risks and profit from products/services they create. Without those compacts, there’s very few business that you currently profit from/buy products from/sell products to/acquire the services of that would exist.
Major new developments almost never happen in the context of an established, reliable and completely predictable regulatory framework. How could they? Smart business will be awake to the fact that regulators at some point will weigh in, particularly if a technology is actually significant. That's why people probably care less whether you can install new apps or use other marketplaces on your smart fridge right now, but they are very concerned about how certain companies can influence digital services on mobile devices.
No one, certainly not me, ever said that financial viability is
no concern. I said it's not the
only concern, especially not if your focus isn't any one particular company, but the market as a whole. The best way to make one company financially viable, in the extreme, is to give it a monopoly but we are very clearly concerned about this, particularly at the macro level. Besides, even accepting your argument, opening up digital markets does not necessarily undermine the financial viability of bringing devices to markets, although it may impact whether particular services (e.g. Apple Pay) will be as successful as they are now. On the flip side, this may improve the financial viability of other companies and give them a fighting chance.
Additionally, with only two large providers of software platforms, consumer choice is already severely limited. What if Google decides that it wants to extract more profit from Android as well and limits the extent to which others can provide services outside of their ecosystem (Google's
already cracking down on those freedoms inside the Play Store)?
Is every service provider expected to create their own hardware platform?!
