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Comment by basch | Hacker News Reader

Apple can argue its 30% surcharge protects consumers from their payment information being tied to each individual product, making canceling easier and buying things safer.

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Then let the market decide if they're ready to pay 30% for that, when they can get <1% at larger competitors who are not even allowed on the platform. iOS is so ubiquitous at this point it should be treated by regulators as a platform, not as a product.

Sure and if they believed consumers value that, they wouldn't object to competing with alternative payment options.

... and competitors do the same for less than a tenth of that cost. The only thing that allows them to do so is complete control over the ecosystem to shut out all competition.

That's literally the value add Apple is selling. A completely controlled ecosystem not infiltrated by 20 payment middle men. Youre paying a premium for noise filtering.

I pay them so I don't need to make the choice!

If I wanted a different choice I'd buy a different brand of phone.

You mean Really just one different choice, no? I’d like to choose webOS or Windows Phone, but I can’t.

Also, many can dislike this issue but still not buy an Android. It isn’t like this is the only differentiator.

An oligopoly is an oligopoly. Would be redundant to bring in how this one has mediocre products now.

If that were the legitimate reason, then they could accomplish the same goal by requiring all in-app purchases to have the option of going through them, rather than exclusively going through them. Then people who cared enough to pay the 30% Apple tax could have that protection, and the rest of us could save a lot of money.

I agree that is a sensible compromise, like login. "If you support our competitors, you must support our implementation to benefit from placement in our index."

Paypal does the same thing and charges an order of magnitude less.

which I very much agree with.

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