App stores, trust and anti-trust | Hacker News Reader

App stores, trust and anti-trust

ben-evans.com

56 pointskaboro93 comments

This article is just repeating the same Apple messaging points they've given us.

First off, the article's biggest point, the security sandbox, is not the issue at all with the App Store. The entire internet runs inside of a sandbox.

Developers understand they must play fair on a device that is shared with other developers. I don't think I've seen anyone complain of this anywhere.

However, what Apple has employed its engineering team to do is create and enforce only one path to getting usable apps on the device and that's through installing via the App Store.

>First off, the article's biggest point, the security sandbox, is not the issue at all with the App Store. The entire internet runs inside of a sandbox.

The web has become one horrible user experience. When left alone, developers apparently don't play nice, they hog bandwidth and user resources left and right. A few tabs on a web browser easily saturates the machine resources these days, be it internet bandwidth, RAM or CPU.

Ads, user tracking or poor developer skills, the cause doesn't matter. Apart for HN and few more, the web is a horrible place for the user and the techie ones are taking active measures to fight it(tab killers, ad blockers, script blockers and so on).

Good behavior on an iOS device is not enforced by the app store, but by the OS. Background processing is limited on a timer, the OS throttles processes that use too much background processing & networking depending on context, etc.

The OS also suspends background apps fairly aggressively compared to the foreground app. Mobile apps also give you more tracking variables to do fingerprinting with than browsers do and it's pretty much impossible to practically add a local firewall to iOS devices to block ads. Adblocking isn't a practical thing on mobile apps.

Similarly, managing bad 'tabs' is really the browser's responsibility.

Do you suggest that browsers should adopt Apple's approach? I kind of like the idea of tabs being active only when selected and browsers rejecting pages that are too much resource intensive.

That said, I wrote that in response to the claim that "Developers understand they must play fair on a device that is shared with other developers" but apparently missed to quote it.

So no, developers don't play nice, in fact a lot of them are horrible greedy people and that's why we can't have nice things. Ethics are very poor in that profession and that’s why we need very tight screws to have good user experience.

This is already similar to Apple’s approach, as you can notice tabs refreshing and losing data when you come back to it.

I don’t notice such a thing. How can I reproduce it? What OS and browser?

iOS and macOS Safari.

In iOS it's mostly when you have a lot of things open and too little memory. In macOS they don't reload (or maybe it's rare) but they do sleep. But it's very hard to notice.

Yeah browsers do to some point and probably can do more to improve the situation.

One annoying thing about apple's aggressive approach although is it's difficult to have actual background processes running on your device. Stuff like arc app keeps on getting shut down, it's difficult to have a mail client or an image syncing service actually be running in the background as frequently as apple's first party ones and so on.

Also you can't run something like little snitch on your mobile device.

In the desktop case this is ok, since you have the escape hatch of electron apps in the web tech example, but in iOS you don't have anything.

> Good behavior on an iOS device is not enforced by the app store, but by the OS.

Unfortunately, both.

It shouldn't happen, but in practice (on another OS, but I doubt there's a correlation between cognitive capabilities and preferred mobile device vendor, lol) people were installing those "brightest" flashlight apps mindlessly granting them every single permission they ask for.

The machines can't yet analyze appropriateness of the request. That's where human moderation comes into play.

> This article is just repeating the same Apple messaging points they've given us.

Unrelated, but this is just about my least favorite criticism of an argument. "Messaging points" are used/reused because they're usually the strongest arguments. By pointing this out, you're just saying "this person is just repeating the strongest arguments". Attack the argument, not its provenance!

That's true, but I've read GP's post more along the lines of "we've already heard those arguments and debated them, there's nothing new here".

Just repeating the same arguments (whether they're right or wrong) doesn't really help move the discussion forward...

The post can be a recap though or targeted at the general audience, not to us who "heard those arguments" before.

I don't know, it would be great if any of these people had bothered talking to a lawyer or an anti-trust scholar, a provenance that would matter a lot to understanding this issue.

For example, almost everyone here will learn more reading "Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox" (https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...) to understand why Epic set things up the particular, exact way they did - because they got Apple to take down a store page that clearly gave consumers the option to buy something at a lower price.

If you don't want to be prejudiced by educational background, which is reasonable, you can easily tell if a take on the Apple v. Epic case is well-informed by simply Ctrl+F searching "consumer welfare." Additionally if the writer makes the distinction between the legal realism (what will happen, which is that Epic will relist but not sell IAP on the App Store anymore, and the outcome of the case will be non-precedent-forming), the legalism (what should happen, which is that Apple is reducing consumer welfare), and what you hope will happen, which surprisingly, for Ben Evans, I guess Apple makes even more money?

I'm not sure why people think this was some great legal trap pulled off here. Everyone already knows that Apple's commission is 30%. Simply charging less in the app doesn't actually show that Apple's commission is harming consumer welfare (or conversely with Spotify, charging more in iOS). Epic would have to show that Apple's alleged monopoly power is raising prices at a supracompetitive level in a relevant market.

You have a page, it says “if you pay using a credit card versus the same exact credit card except you give to Apple earlier, here is a 20% discount,” that is obviously increasing consumer welfare. Apple booted them when they made that page. It sort of doesn’t have to say anything about the commission, because it doesn’t matter.

Epic could have offered 20% off and STILL paid the commission, and if Apple booted them, it would still harm consumer welfare!

That’s why Ben Evans and Stratechery and so many tech takes are wrong, they’re just not informed on the status quo of antitrust. It’s not material where the consumer welfare comes from, it’s not material the goods being sold are imaginary IAP, etc etc.

> I don't know, it would be great if any of these people had bothered talking to a lawyer or an anti-trust scholar, a provenance that would matter a lot to understanding this issue.

By this logic, the vast majority on this forum have no business talking about this issue.

> Attack the argument, not its provenance!

Eh, it seems you didn't read past GP's first sentence.

I had no issues (at least procedurally) with the arguments past GP's first sentence, hence why I prefaced it with "unrelated". I was strictly attacking the first sentence. It is entirely possible to have targeted criticism of something...

This is a whole lot of words that doesn't clearly convey the core point: Apple App Store payments should compete on technical/business merits and not be mandatory based upon contractual obligations.

Epic is fine with the appstore, but it wants to handle it's own in-app payments. You can have an app store with a separate in app payments; Uber does for example. Epic says as much in it's argument for a preliminary injunction.*

Stadia is actually more of an existential issue than Epic because they want to run unapproved games.

* https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/epic-v-apple-8-17-20-768927327...

Stadia and it's ilk are not running any apps other than video streaming and input capture. The apps and games you play via them are run on a remote server and I/O is streamed between it and your device. If that's running "unapproved apps" then so is twitch when it did Twitch Plays Pokemon.

You notice that Epic isn’t insisting on in app payments for any of the consoles, why not?

Can I use in app payments within the Epic app that allow me to bypass Epic and get virtual currency even cheaper than Epic?

Epic gets to choose how people buy currency on its platform. What’s the difference?

I think their fee is much lower.

Also, there are competing "stores" on PC, including the buy-cd-from-physical-store-and-pay-no-fees option. On iPhone it's apples way or the highway.

So while epic are hypocrites, they can be bypassed easily.

There are no competing stores within Fortnite’s “platform”.

> This is a trade-off, but there's a certain kind of person in tech that thinks app stores and the iOS sandbox have nothing to do with the success of smartphones and the iPhone - they're just a stupid Apple thing you could get rid of with no ill effects.

> Unfortunately, you can’t have your cake and eat it. A secure system with a switch to turn off the security might work for Linux and a highly technical user, but when you’ve given smartphones to a few billion people, a secure system with a switch to turn off the security is just a target for malware.

One of the things I found very frustrating about this article is that it fails to remember the actual history: when the iPhone first came out, jailbreaks were plentiful and powerful... the iPhone tried to be a closed and locked down platform, but failed due to the almost continual existence of serious security flaws that allowed for 0-day drops of exploits with almost every new device release (which coincided with every new major iOS release).

This means that we can actually look back at the history of the iPhone and answer the question "could the iPhone have been as successful as it was if there had been a switch that allowed users to opt out of Apple's complete control of not only whose apps could be installed, but further what kind of software could be installed (to let you install things like daemons or extensions to existing apps)" and the answer is "apparently, it could, because it did".

In fact, it is the opposite question that we can't easily answer: "would the iPhone have been as successful as it was without the ability to opt out of Apple's closed ecosystem?"... and this is a question where the answer is not at all obvious: for many many years the iPhone very poorly satisfied the needs of users in many countries, and jailbreaking filled the gap. Apple didn't get around to having a good Chinese keyboard until iOS 5 or 6 or so, and so Baidu maintained one and seriously encouraged users of their search engine to jailbreak from their landing page. Meanwhile, the feature set was in some real sense anemic, and jailbreaking also filled that gap: as a trivial example, Steve Jobs seemed very anti-wallpaper, a feature which didn't appear until iOS 4... the number of people who jailbroke just to install wallpaper was incredible ;P.

And honestly, I think Apple sort of knew that: I had always gotten the distinct impression that they considered the bugs used by people who jailbroke to be pretty low priority, and they would sometimes remain unfixed for months on end. At some point, the iPhone started to get "good enough" by default, and it was only then that Apple really started to turn down the screws, deciding to fix bugs quickly and even hire jailbreakers who never believed in the cause--those who were willing to play the game as a mercenary for hire--to defend the platform instead of being on the offensive. Today, jailbreaking thereby feels like a niche ecosystem, but it mattered for at least half the history of the iPhone, with something like 12% of users being jailbroken (it would quickly fall a bit on new firmware releases and then rise back up).

The reality is that innovation happens on platforms because of the ability for people to make modifications and enhancements without having to wait for the platform vendor: if iOS had succeeded in truly being a closed ecosystem, Baidu would not have been able to build custom keyboards to support Chinese users as Apple didn't get around to supporting third-party custom keyboards until iOS 8. Open platforms thereby get new features faster and can support the needs of many more users from any number of market subsets. Yes: it is the case that a closed system can sort of try to satisfy the needs of at least most people, but you don't get there overnight, and even coming up with sane extensibility hooks takes time. The real experiment has thus only recently begun: can a platform where only a single company can decide how to deploy new features continue to maintain its relevance going forward?

Totally agreed! I, for one, wouldn't have gotten into iOS at all if it wasn't for jailbreak, and I was jailbreaking peoples iPhone and iTouches in way back in elementary school, so I guess I have to thank you for that! I think a way to bridge the gap is to sell both a locked down and an unlocked iPhone, and allow users to go to an Apple Store to unlock their phones. That way, casual users won't risk unlocking their phones without knowing what they're getting into.

LG does a similar thing with factory unlocked phones - you can contact their support, agree to a disclaimer, and get a bootloader unlock, if you are in Europe or the Middle East.

I genuinely don't understand this argument. The fact that a platform succeeded despite security holes is not an argument against removing those holes. You might as well say that the malware explosion on Windows wasn't a problem because Windows still did well.

> I genuinely don't understand this argument. The fact that a platform succeeded despite security holes is not an argument against removing those holes.

True enough, but you're just assuming the truth of your argument by using non-neutral words.

The fact that a platform succeeded despite security holes is not an argument against removing those holes.

The fact that a platform succeeded thanks to security holes is an argument against removing those holes.

But how do you know which fact you're looking at?

The quoted idea you are trying to defend in your article--explicitly, forcibly, and frankly even a bit condescendingly (via "a certain type of person") :(--is that Apple having a closed ecosystem was a necessary prerequisite to the iPhone's success, that removing this aspect of the product would destroy its value, and that it takes "a certain kind of person" to believe that the success of the iPhone somehow wasn't because of this closed up shop. You are trying to make this argument from a position of strength.

However, we have the most direct evidence possible for this assertion being false: the iPhone in fact had a "switch" (in the form of exploits for security holes that were packaged up as consumer-friendly tools to "jailbreak" the device) that let users do the strongest possible variant of what anyone talks about--allowing the user complete decision making over all of the software running on the device, not merely to install some banned apps--and not only did the world not end but somehow the iPhone was still a success.

We therefore know, without any trace of doubt, because it already happened, that if Apple didn't have centralized control over an App Store--and even if users were able to opt out of the sandbox, which notably isn't actually the argument being made by Epic! that is just something you threw in for dramatic effect and yet even still ignores the history ;P--that not only wouldn't the world end from user self-inflicted malware, but that the iPhone would still have been a success, because we actually saw this play out.

Now, you can make an entirely different argument that this freedom to install software from third parties should come from something other than a "security hole": I wouldn't disagree there, and neither would Epic! However, you aren't making that argument: you are arguing that the entire concept of undermining Apple's centralized control via their App Store is itself a security flaw and that if it didn't exist would have destroyed the iPhone's ability to succeed... which again, we know--without speculation--is false.

Or you could try to make a speculative argument that maybe the iPhone could still have been a success even if it had always been a locked down and closed ecosystem the way you want. I think that would be a difficult argument, and in fact I have already provided some seeds of the opposite argument: that if the platform in fact had been locked down the way you seem to think it had been, that it might not have been as much of a success as it was. This could be a fun argument, FWIW, but it again isn't the argument you are making.

Why don't disgruntled app developers just pull their apps from the app stores? Everyone is using custom launchers on Android these days anyway, lets show big tec how much customers want to use custom launchers.

RIP your app on iOS if you remove it from the app store.

There is very little an iPhone user can do if their phone isn't rooted.

How about: one developer puts a "launcher app" in the App store, and all the other developers use that to launch their apps?

That’s also against the rules.

And how about: one developer creates a web-browser with some features that will make it start fast on certain web-apps that don't use javascript but only wasm, while other developers create apps for that browser?

Having an alternative web engine is also against the rules. No I don’t agree with that rule.

According to this article, billions of desktop operating systems users would not be able to handle their computers without destroying them with malware.

Which one are you more likely to do, install a random app on your phone from an untrusted author or your computer?

Recalling the days of Bonzi Buddy, I don't think the average consumer is more or less likely to do it on either platform.

Isn’t that the point? Bonzi Buddy could do a lot less damage on an iPhone than a computer and when you delete it, you can be sure that it didn’t leave anything behind.

And it’s not just BonziBuddy.

Even Zoom left a backdoor on Macs after you uninstalled it.

In my case none or both, depending on the need. The point is, you could allow lower security if people need it and it's not necessarily that catastrophic as the author suggests.

Why are people acting as if three decades of malware, ransomware, and toolbars haven’t happened on PCs?

I'm generally for more tech regulation, but I don't want to see Apple's position of power degraded. What may be needed is regulations to limit Apple's take, because 30% of a $2 app is fine in my eyes, but 30% of an app that goes for $50 is a bit much. To me it's the amount of work involved. Apple does more work for more complex apps, but it doesn't really scale with the investment involved.

I really don't want to go back to the days where I have to enter my credit card in some stupid payment form instead of just authenticating with face id.

The can add 30% on top of the cost so the user can decide for themselves.

Apple is a giant 2 trillion dollar company, one of the richest in the world. I think they can recover from allowing other companies in this world to compete with them on equal footing.

I think a more interesting angle is to look at incentives. With Apple deriving so much revenue from having a stranglehold on software running on iOS, are they incentivized to improve the mobile web (which would be an alternative to being forced to use an app for many use cases)? Are they actively stifling innovation in web standards for mobile because of their conflict of interest? As more and more of internet usage goes mobile, mobile web becomes the default web and Apple's market dominance in the space gives them the same power of its development as Microsoft had with IE pre-2001.

Another thing to consider is, if Apple has such a dominant position in this critical market, how are they using it to dominate other adjacent markets? For example, they're able to provide the exact same service as Spotify, Netflix, Dropbox but with a 30% pricing advantage. What other markets will they enter with this advantage? And should they be able to? And that's to speak nothing of their other non-financial advantages (ie. first-party integrations, native "advertising" of services, etc).

I look forward to a DOJ investigation, mostly because it's only in these probes where you get answers to the above questions, and understand the degree to which the company is considering these problems internally.

I am trying to understand why is this business model from apple not acceptable, from my point of view the way apple makes money on the apple store is with the 30% fees on transations. In exchange they give out tools, libraries and services for free. Do i get that wrong?

with that in mind isnt the request of Epic something like: "We want access to all your platform and tools for free?"

If I have an ebook store and want to give iOS users a nice experience when buying books Apple will make the books more expensive with 30% and on top of that if I want to give my users information that they have the option to buy cheaper from my website I can't , Apple is preventing their users to get informed/educated on how to get cheaper stuff because this information costs Apple money.

Btw you can have apps that do not use any of Apple SDKs (for example engines will use the OS core and neither of the fancy GUI toolkits and languages)

> If I have an ebook store and want to give iOS users a nice experience when buying books Apple will make the books more expensive with 30% and on top of that if I want to give my users information that they have the option to buy cheaper from my website I can't , Apple is preventing their users to get informed/educated on how to get cheaper stuff because this information costs Apple money.

Well i go back to my argument of isnt that like saying: "i like to use your ebook platform to sell my stuff, but i dont want to pay for it"

the fact that you switched from software to ebook does not change the fact that you want to choose to be able to sell without giving a commission to apple for the store they did set up

How about the $99/yr app store fee they already pay?

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Epic's $99 doesn't cover the cost of Apple actually hosting and distributing Fortnite and its updates to users.

Well, Apple TOS forbids them using their own servers for updates (which btw Facebook ignores and gets away with)..

But what would be a fair price? Given how cheap bandwidth and storage is would $50,000 suffice? Surely that's closer to apples real costs than 30% of hundreds of million dollars they want now?

Sure, if is not the excuse that the wall garden if for the user safety or for the user privacy and in fact it makes things more expensive for the user and it prevents user getting informed then we change to the excuse that is Apple hardware and Apple can fuck their customers as long as is legal and PR is good enough,

You are defending Apple not allowing developers to present their customers a simple text information, at least for now your banking apps are not taxed by Apple.

Can I put a book in your hypothetical ebook store without giving you a cut?

If I made such a store I would use the web hosting model, you have a super cheap plan and if you want more feature you pay extra, I would care about your sales similar on how web hosting do not care about what you sell from your website.

Why is web hosting so cheap and you have so many options? Because of competition, allow competition with at least 5 stores and you will see different prices and features.

Let's say running an ebook service, that cost cost you some money, a portion of your profit will go into building this shop, that will also be used by another party, because you have millions of users and a good trusted brand. in order to sell on that market you sell a some subcription based like a web hosting.

Party B, after using your premuim service, decide he will use your service just as a frontstore, sending your customer to his own website to complete purchase.

in your opinion that is a fair situation?

Yes, my web hosting is not jealous if I pay them 100$/year and I do sales of 1 million. If say my site generates too much traffic then I will have to upgrade the CPU,HDD etc. They make money when I am successful and use their resources. I can always change the web hosting and still reach my existing customers where with Apple I can't reach my existing customers if Apple kicks me out(see Epic)

I dont think that is a fair comparison, you took away all the issues with branding, your customer dont really care if you are hosting a website yourself or aws or anything else, probably most of them wont even know what that means.

If you want to start to sell ebooks (or anything really) you get an advantage by placing it in a well known store, you can prove me wrong but i think that is a fair statement.

So it is really hard for me to accept as fair a situation where you could build a store, build the brand reputation, host other people product and not get a compensation.

Netflix or Epic do not benefit of Apple Store brand, my bank does not put their app in Google or Apple sore because they hope to get on "top apps" , they put their app there because they have no choice, the users are there and they want an app.

If you think the Apple Sore brand or "top apps" is important then have extra options (like web hosting). So I might not want my app to be promoted, I just want my users to be able to install the app I link from my website similar how they can install it on their PC. If my updates are eat6inb bandwidth then I pay for that, if I want to be promoted I can pay for that, if I want support I can pay for that, if I want an IDE I can pay for that etc.

I think you are putting popular apps like Netflix,Epic,Dropbox, my bank thagt have no choice to be on all platforms with some small video game or TODO app that benefits by getting exposed to people on a "Top apps" or "Similar apps" screen.

yes, i am putting all the developer on the app store on the same level, because coding into law the distinction that it's so obvious for you is not going to be easy. at what point "randomgamecompany" became so big to be promoted to "i dont need to pay for the app store anymore." Laws are not perfect, nobody should work for free.

It is not about the law, is about your attitude, you are treating all applications like all are something a developer put together to make some quick money profiting of Apple market.

Also I don't believe Apple is incapable of creating more fair rules(maybe you can't come up with this rules but Apple has the money to spend on smart people to work a few months on this) they don't want to do it.

You’re not talking about web building. You’re talking about an online store.

If I get kicked off of Epic’s platform. Where do I go?

>If I get kicked off of Epic’s platform. Where do I go?

Steam, GOG, Windows Store, itch.io put your app on mega/GDrive,Dropbox and share the link on Facebook and Twitter should I continue ?

I guess I should be more specific. If I get kicked off of Fortnite, can I play in Fortnite’s sandbox? Can I buy virtual coins to use in Fortnite from a third party?

Why does Epic get to be the only company that can sell virtual currency in Fortnite?

What if instead of buying apps with money, Apple made everyone by “Apple points” to buy things on the App Store like MS use to do?

>I guess I should be more specific. If I get kicked off of Fortnite, can I play in Fortnite’s sandbox?

There are more then 1 alternatives to Fortnite but I can't name them. This is a bad example, you compare 1 free game with a store. Stay on topic and let/s compare stores like Google Play, Steam, GOG etc. Is Steam taking 30% if you buy some skin in a game? Is GOG doing that? Are this stores blocking you showing a text with a link to your website purchase page?

> Do i get that wrong?

Yes.

> We want access to all your platform and tools for free?

Well, they do pay the $99 annual fee + cost of a Mac required for submitting to the store :)

More seriously, you are wrong because Epic/Spotify/etc don't mind giving apple money when they use their payment infrastructure _but_ want to be able to also use their own infrastructure and sell things 30% cheaper.

And yes, for companies with multiple sale points (fortnite is also on PC and consoles ?), apple TOS forbids Epic selling things cheaper elsewhere which means in-game item prices are artificially increased by up to 30% on _all platforms_.

but how is this different from, for example, me selling stuff on amazon? i want to access the amazon customer pool, so i pay amazon a fee to do it?

what would be apple alternatives that would not imply giving away services for free? i still have an hard time understanding this part: i understand that 30% cut i a lot i am not defending the 30% tax.

Amazon itself is in hot waters for antitrust, so perhaps you shouldn't use them as an example.

Still, there's a giant difference - Amazon's "customer pool" isn't forced to buy only on Amazon and Amazon doesn't force YOU to ONLY sell the same item to that "customer pool" (I like how you use a term that makes people seem like inanimate objects.) via Amazon.

This is a massive difference. All the benefits of free market (as opposed to command economy) are derived from customers being able to freely choose another vendor and product to purchase. Monopolized integrated services are just a corporate version of command economy where a single actor dictates pricing and eliminates competition leading to severe lack of innovation and worse products for everyone.

The $99/yr fee is supposed to cover apples costs for the store. Google asks for $25 and they have 6 times more devices to serve...

At this point the 30% is basically free money they get on someone elses hard work. And there is no consistency, some companies pay much less.

This is even more wrong in case of Spotify which is a direct competitor to apple music. Apple basically makes their competition 30% more expensive hence less competitive. (And you can by no means claim Spotify is big because of app store so the fee is fair, they exited before the first iPhone)

> which means in-game item prices are artificially increased by up to 30% on _all platforms_.

Or means that Epic takes a 30% hit on revenue on the App Store and Google Play Store in exchange for the services provided.

Do you honestly believe that this is about Epic trying to lower prices for their users? It's not, it's about Epic getting all of the pie instead of just 70% of the pie. If Apple had caved before this stunt then prices would have stayed the same, but Epic would be taking it all themselves rather than having to pay Apple the 30% cut.

I am fine with epic getting a bigger piece of the pie, after all they are doing the work and apple is just taxing them. We are talking about 30% of hundreds of millions of dollars. The yearly developer fee Epic pays Apple should cover apples costs more than enough.

Apple and google already allow certain companies (uber, netflix,... ) to pay much less which by itself is anti-competitive.

You are missing the fact that epic is not a payment provider. So if they dont pay apple the 30%, they will have to pay stripe or adyen or any other psp. Most of those ask 0.25$ + 2% per transaction. For a fortnite skin of 0,99 or even whole apps that cost 0,99 that 30% is lower than the costs of other psp’s. And apple provides a lot more than just payments for that 30%. They handle disputes and refunds etc. and the handle all the money exchanges with sales is other countries etc

You're trying to argue that Apple IAP is a good deal for Epic, but Epic has clearly decided that it isn't.

I don't know why anyone reads Ben Evans - he's a sycophant for big tech who seems to lack the ability to objectively reason about monopoly power.

Conversely, that's probably why a lot of software engineers do read him, because he reaffirms their beliefs that big tech is in the right.

i don't think the rank and file working for "big tech" are emotionally invested in whether their employer can stay a monopoly or not - if anything lack of competition among large employers means its easier to collude with each other to suppress compensation

This isn't even a hypothetical concern: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-po...

Well, since a large part of the compensation is RSU’s why wouldn’t an employer of big tech want the monopoly to grow?

On the other hand if the company behind Candy Crush were complaining about not making enough on coins, no one would be taking their side.

given that the average tenure for a rank and file at a tech co is like 3 years, no i don’t think a significant number of them really think they want to see a tiny number of big tech cos maintain their monopoly so their RSUs go up 15% a year

Amazon’s stock doubled in a year.

yes so have a lot of tech stocks - i’m obviously talking about a normal year - not one where the Fed prints $3T in a few months and creates the first stock bubble to happen in a recession lol

Except profits re up for all the big tech as people buy computers for Zoom U, working from home, etc. Amazon got a huge cut of commerce generally because it’s delivered during shelter-in-place, and Netflix became the thing to do when everything else is canceled. In this environment, it’s clear that people are fleeing to safety and these are the only companies growing... plus they’re known brand names.

I don’t think it’s fair to say the Fed introducing liquidity is the reason why. You’d need to point to real data to back that up.

ok i don’t need to explain to anyone how the Fed flooding $3-4T into the economy went mostly to propping up asset prices.

Well, you clearly don't read anything I write - this piece ends by saying Apple's IAP model is unsustainable and needs to be dismantled, and my previous post said big tech companies are going to become as tightly regulated as banks.

I don't see it. I read it twice and tried searching for "unsustainable" and "dismantle". Could you point out where you said that exactly?

Presumably:

> This second one is instructive: the EU is taking the view that Apple has a monopoly of payment on the iPhone. Market definition is everything. I-am-not-a-lawyer, but I don’t see how Apple can win on Spotify (or Kindle), and I don’t think it should.

And the final sentence:

> Apple finally won the argument with users’ wallets, and that means it’s not niche anymore - Apple has become the navy, and different rules apply.

that doesn’t read “needs to be dismantled” at all

Can I put music on Spotify without them getting a cut?

Yes, you can import any mp3 that you want into your Spotify playlists.

i read him, he's great! take it back ;)

the a16z cult is strong

or you’re all just afraid your boss is reading

Well First That is not what he said.

Second, over the years every time I sort of disagree with him on any issues I would later learn I was wrong. So the lesson is he knows a lot more than I do, and often well researched on the topic. It is better to sit down and think what he wrote rather than outright dismissive of it.

I do wish he could host some sort of AMA.

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