Apple CEO Tim Cook Tells CBS News, “We Are Not A Monopoly”

Dade Hayes

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, believes a degree of regulatory scrutiny is “fair” given the company’s sprawling scale, but he insists it is “not a monopoly.”

He made the comments to CBS News (see the video below) as Apple unveiled a range of new products and services at its developers conference in San Jose on Monday. On the same day, the House Judiciary Committee announced an investigation of tech giants, a move that followed reports of a Department of Justice probe of Google and a Federal Trade Commission investigation of Amazon.

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In a segment of an interview slated to run in full on Tuesday’s CBS Evening News, anchor Norah O’Donnell asked Cook if he felt that Apple has grown too big.

“I don’t think so,” he replied. “But with size, I think scrutiny is fair. I think we should be scrutinized. But if you look at our – any kind of measure about is Apple a monopoly or not, I don’t think anybody reasonable is gonna come to the conclusion that Apple’s a monopoly.”

The company’s market share, Cook explained, is “modest,” with a shade less than 40% of the U.S. smartphone market in recent years and an even smaller slice of the PC sector.

O’Donnell reminded Cook that Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, the U.S. Senator who ran the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has said that Apple must separate the App Store from other operating segments.

“I strongly disagree with that,” Cook said. “I think some people would argue, if you are selling a good, then you can’t have a product that competes with that good. And I think that’s part of what is being argued there. But that’s an argument, Norah, that takes you down the path that, Walmart shouldn’t be stocking alternative or house brand(s) … And so this is decades of U.S. law here.”

Here is the section of the CBS Evening News interview:

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