We're back. This is Mlex's weekly podcast on regulatory affairs. My name is James Panicki. I'm from

Emlex's Asia Pacific team. Thank you for joining us today. Now, even if you're not a gamer,

you'd be familiar with the online sensation Fortnite. You may also be aware that the company

behind Fortnite, Epic Games, has picked a fight with two significant Silicon Valley players, Apple

and Google. Epic's lawsuit against Apple centers on the tech

giant's app store. It suggests that technical and contractual restrictions that prevent

other forms of app distribution from being available to users with an Apple device amount to the

company exercising and abusing its monopoly power. In fact, Epic argues that Apple

has built a monopoly in one market and used it to enforce a monopoly in a second one. It's

dramatic stuff and of course it ticks all of Emlex's editorial boxes. The lawsuits also align

with complaints made to the European Commission by audio streaming

company Spotify. In just a few minutes, we'll look at how this issue is reverberating in Asia.

We'll take a look at recent developments in South Korea. First, though, we're joined by Mike

Acton, a senior correspondent who covers tech issues for Emlex, and he joins me now.

Okay, so Mike, walk me through this idea firstly. A monopoly within a monopoly, what is the argument

there? If we take a sort of broader sort of look at what Apple is, it's the first publicly traded

US firms to be valued at $2 trillion.

And in terms of the smartphone market, Apple hovers around a sort of 45% share in the U.S.

That's around 100 million users. So in essence, the core monopoly, the initial monopoly here

that's alleged is, but it seems fairly self-evident,

is the huge number of users that are locked into Apple's devices that run on the iOS operating system.

So if you're an app developer and you want to reach those 100 million users, you need to go

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