"Before this case, it wouldn't have been clear if I, as a consumer, went on Amazon and purchased something from a third party seller, that I could sue Amazon for anticompetitive damages related to that sale," said Valarie Williams, a partner at the law firm Alston & Bird. "But that's clear now.
"When you talk about monopolization claims, the main issue is exclusion, unfair exclusion," Roberti said. "So all these companies are going to be asking themselves: Is there anything we are doing that is excluding competitors?" Google already treats Android "like an open system, whereas Apple is a walled garden," said Marty Puranik, the CEO of the cloud computing firm Atlantic.Net, who has followed the case closely.
Apple has said that its control of the App Store allows it to ensure that apps are safe and virus-free, and do what they say they will do.