Google: “Any harm Epic has suffered is not irreparable and is of its own making”
fosspatents.com
fosspatents.com
I guess a comparison would be a utility that both owns the transmission lines and power plants? However, the transmission line rates are set by regulation. We have accepted as a society that the infrastructure needs to have regulated pricing.
So why is it all that different here?
The transmission of the products, just given the way the cellphone market works, is basically limited to either App Store or Android Store. I basically have no alternative.
Isn't that approaching a monopoly / duopoly where regulation starts to make sense?
I say this all as a fairly conservative person, but it just seems too similar to utilities to me...
Why am I wrong? (Serious Question)
Or it might be a cartel (few players are coordinating for maximum revenue, are not competing, prices are fixed), but we usually won't let that stand either.
It's good to remember that Google and Apple (and others) have been found to collude before when they made secret no-poaching deals. They settled for $415m.
I don't know how that would work though, without breaking up the companies.
… Let's just say there's a reason my example is oddly concrete.
In your example, as far as I know consumers do not actually interact with the power plants, and have no choice on what utility company to use; to do so would require duplicate infrastructure. In the (either) app store case there is — I can still install the Microsoft mail client instead of the Apple or Google ones.
This wouldn’t work now, but if it was done when Netflix was growing it would have severely impacted their ability to compete.
Which is exactly how Xfinity OnDemand works.
Apple’s creation, development, and control of the App Store is akin to Comcast’s Xfinity OnDemand. They are both retail stores owned, operated and curated by their private enterprise creators in order to sell some first party but mostly third-party content.
Utility regulation only works when the product doesn’t change and is a fungible commodity - power is power. It also is about driving prices down for consumers for that commodity.
The iOS and Google platforms have barely existed more than a decade, and the platforms are constantly evolving. New platforms and ecosystems are emerging too, with Facebook/Oculus, Valve/Steam, Amazon with Fire/Alexa, etc.
Enshrining today’s dominant app platforms as the government sanctioned ones will surely stifle their evolution and innovation, because that’s what declaring something a utility is: a commodity with no differentiation.
The crux of this matter is that end consumers generally do not care about the 30% cut, It’s a retail cut they’re used to from other platforms like Sony PlayStation, or Ticketmaster for concert tickets. it barely impacts them (and arguably the curated stores are a better overall experience). I also don’t think almost any consumer of iOS would agree their App ecosystem experience is fungible with Android or anyone else. This is entirely driven by Devs and publishers that want better margins.
The counterpoint being that Ticketmaster doesn't take a 30% cut on consession sales at the event AFAIK.
That's the real issue - these stores are distributing some apps for free and some for pay. Hence free apps can sidestep paying the Google/Apple cut and then offer in-app payments directly. But that's entirely due to their business model of allowing free apps and taking a cut on paid apps.
Ticketmaster doesn't provide as complex of a service as Apple does with the App Store.
The service doesn't seem that complex. Executing the service well may very well be complex, but the service itself isn't.
So it's like you use Google Firebase as the backend for your app and they take a cut under that agreement, as opposed to the Play Store agreement.
There was an attempt to argue they were a monopoly that should be regulated due to the % of the ticket they retained (Pearl Jam spearheaded this in the 90s). It didn’t work.
Also I see nothing wrong as a business model with the Firebase analogy. If you could convince customers to go for it, then why not? Will the business model police arrest you?
What I don’t get about these arguments is that they’re trying to get the government to punish a couple of companies that built a very successful business model purely because others want some of that dough. This isn’t about monopoly by any historical definition, it’s about sour grapes.
I think by inadvertently comparing them to ticketmaster (whom consumers actively loathe) you've inadvertently demonstrated just how much consumers do care.
Consumers just aren't necessarily able to understand the underlying market mechanism that gives rise to the shittiness they experience.
Banks don't offer the same services and prices, and they cann innovate by creating new financial products, which seems to address your fear of losing the innovation in a regulated market.
When a bank wants to participate in a market it operates, it is forced to create a subsidiary, which is not allowed to have a better deal, or insider information.
These rules have been pivotal in the development of market operations, because they offered investors confidence that they had recourse against rigged markets.
In effect, that would mean that Apple and others. would be able to compete with app creators, but 1) Market owner's apps would have to pay the 30%, and 2) market owner would have to provide equivalent ToS enforcement for all services.
Once you have critical mass, failure is next to impossible, slow and even preventable. Microsoft has been dominating desktop computing since 1981 through MS DOS and 1991 through Windows (almost 40 years!). Android and iOS will probably be around for 50 years, even if they become just another layer. We still have radio, TV, heck, even the post and vinyl.
Computing has changed. It crossed the chasm.
zOS is still the dominant OS for mainframes (60 years later!), MS-DOS was replaced by a product from the same company, Windows, that is still the dominant OS for desktops (30 years later). I don't see anything on the horizon that threatens zOS, nor Windows. Except their platforms disappearing, which is still at least 10-20 years from happening.
iOS is the dominant OS for its platform and Apple won't abandon it until the platform dies (I guess once we have wearables that completely replace smartphones?), Android is the dominant OS for all other smartphones. Microsoft poured billions into creating a smartphone app ecosystem and failed. Blackberry, Palm, Nokia, Amazon tried and failed. How, pray tell, would Android die if smartphones are still popular? The Google moat is HUGE.
It's worth noting that Media has gone in the opposite direction - One of the many reasons I was vehemently opposed to Comcast's acquisition of NBC was because it's just too vertically integrated to be good for the consumer.
Something like that happens a lot with mobile networks, where some operators both have a license for bandwidth and sell it to customers, and other operators buy bandwidth from them to sell it to customers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operato...), with an important difference being that customers (sometimes after a few years of contract) are free to switch between providers.
But yes, the important discussion here is whether app stores should become utilities. AFAIK, there is no existing law there, so it will have to be created. Because there is no law, I don’t see Epic winning this in the sense that they will get paid for damages. They may win in the sense that things will change, though.
In fact, even in the grocery retailing industry, there are integrations that would run afoul of the rule you are proposing. Kroger, for instance, sells brands it owns, while selling competing brands for what is, effectively, a commission. I'm not just picking on Kroger, all major chains engage in this practice. I was only using Kroger by way of illustration.
So what you're proposing has far reaching implications. I don't even think it's necessarily "bad", per se. But it does change the entire "order of battle", as it were, in the American retail space. Lots of people would go out of business, and lots more would be in serious financial trouble.
Google and apple effectively have a 30% tax on all mobile software business. They are killing all apetite on developing new mobile software, as less and less developers want to be involved with their shady practices of stealing features and locking apps out.
It would be the same if there were only 2 stores where you can buy clothes in the US and they tax every manufacturer 30% to sell any goods there, while also selling their own goods without commission. On top of that, occasionally stealing good concepts, copying those, and selling as their own products. And of course, locking out annoying partners at their will without having to explain why one manufacturer can no longer engage in business with their customers.
You can buy apps from other Android stores as well. Android stores that have absolutely no affiliation with Google.
This sounds a bit like “nobody drives anymore because the traffic is too bad.” App stores are still growing at a decent clip, no?
I realise a lot of people argue Apple shouldn’t be able to charge anything, or should provide features for side loading and APIs and services to third party stores for free, but that’s not what your suggesting. I’m just critiquing your suggestion.
(1) Telecom provider as a case in point. They provide a fat internet pipe to consumer. But they do not get to bill the application providers (OTT- over-the-top) on a recurring basis.
(2) App marketplace is an interesting and crazy thing. If I subscribed to Netflix through app marketplace, the marketplace does NOT provide me (consumer) any value at all. But if Netflix has to pay 30% to Apple/Google of all the $$ that I pay to Netflix, something is broken in the system from my (consumer) viewpoint.
But it provides Netflix value in that they have more customers.
If you (physically) shop in a store you don't even think about the retail margin.
Here in the UK, a common tactic of theirs is selling a branded product, then if it sells in sufficient quantities they make their own brand, cheaper, sometimes lower quality, version.
And then they put it right next to the original product on the shelf.
It can't be one rule for the tech companies, and another for all the other companies. It's a store, expect the store to take a cut and if you're too successful, compete with you.
It’s like there’s only one supermarket where you can sell your products, but they can still compete with you as you described.
if you don't like this thing we're talking about, why didn't you do anything to stop this other tangentially related thing that happened a long time ago?
I'm not even sure what you are describing makes sense. our supermarket sells hood brand milk, as well as their own private label milk. however the private label version is made at the hood factory using hood milk. in this case, I'm pretty sure the people at Hood don't care which one you buy since they get paid for making the "ripoff" brand.
your example would be fitting if Apple made their own clone of epic's app, but paid epic to do it
While that may or may not be the case in this particular anecdote, it's certainly not the norm.
This is whataboutism.
Many people around here were not old enough to be interested in politics "literally decades ago". And for those who were, the hindsight we have now is a good reason to start getting interested in the issue.
> It's a store, expect the store to take a cut and if you're too successful, compete with you.
The whole point of politics is to fix outstanding issues. "It's always been like that", "suck it" or "fuck you, got mine" rarely make for convincing political speech.
The issue here is not making a comparison, but calling people out for not having addressed the object of the comparison beforehand.
Compare that to app stores: users are in practice not free to pick another app store, even on android - network effects make using alternatives quite tricky and even risky, and the device/OS maker don't make it easy to pick reputable alternative stores. App stores additionally leverage their monopoly on that user to hide their costs from them; e.g. in apples it's not even allowed to mention the cut apple takes and where you might be able to buy more cheaply - and not just in the store, but even in the app itself, even indirectly! There's no MSRP by which to note that that 30% cut is extortionate. Finally whereas last-mile logistics are tricky for real-world goods, app store checkouts are not; almost the entire value provided is in network effects: i.e. the value is provided by the users of the app store, not the app store itself.
All of these disparate factors mean that app stores clearly are not a competitive market, whereas supermarkets aren't quite as bad. But let's not forget: just because supermarkets are "less bad" than app stores doesn't mean there's no potential for market manipulation; we should be vigilant there too - just that the kind of manipulations supermarkets can pull off aren't going to be quite as impactful.
TL;DR: not only are app stores much, much worse than supermarkets when it comes to harmful market manipulation, flaws in one market do not excuse flaws in another anyhow.
Says who?
That only occurs if Apple facilitates/manages the subscription.
AFAIK, they are both generally outside of the "Apple Tax" at this time by redirecting subscription signups to a browser.
ctrl-f for undercut in https://timetoplayfair.com/timeline/
30% is the reward they get for making great business decisions, and as far as competition goes I don’t really think Apple is that serious. Apple Music is an evolution of iTunes, which has been an Apple product for 20 years.
If Spotify wasn’t profitable it wouldn’t exist. Apple’s platform makes that business possible on mobile. If Spotify’s investors weren’t content with making the money they are making now, Spotify can fold up. There is no reason that they have to make a “fair” profit or the same amount of money as Apple Music. None.
When you look at the App Store ecosystem it is incredibly healthy and competitive. There are numerous music apps, all making a ton of money. I have no sympathy here.
This is the very reason Spotify charges more (if they even allow it anymore) when purchased as an iap.
Apple likely has not stomped down on it because that one would be rather clear cut case for courts.
Should AWS have to sell at cost because Amazon uses it for a cheaper price than other retail websites?
Because that’s the same thing, but without cellphones.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21368395/fortnite-epic-ga...
If this allegation is true, it's hard to blame Epic for the losses resulting from a decision that Google made.
https://www.cnet.com/news/just-as-critics-feared-fortnite-fo...
Google let’s all that crap slip but this is a security issue? Nah.
Besides f-droid, do you know of any store that has respected curated or non curated list of apps?
I just don't buy your answer. In fact, I don't even buy that most people know what Android actually is or that it's owned by Google in the first place; I know a frightening number number of people who still refer to their OnePlus or Pixel as a "Samsung." If the OEMs want to make that choice, they should absolutely be allowed to, and if one of the pre-installed apps becomes an attack vector it's more than easy enough for Google to say "we don't have control over that, take it up with [OEM] or [app dev]"
If the deal between Fortnite and Oneplus wouldn't cost Google any money, there's a good chance Google would let it slide, but that doesn't change that their concerns are legitimate. If a grassroots effort stopped this deal, we would all be cheering.
- Agent Smith abused an installation vulnerability in order to inject malicious code into other installed APKs on the device. (https://research.checkpoint.com/2019/agent-smith-a-new-speci...)
- HummingBad used multiple root exploits to auto-root 10 million devices. (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/virul...)
- xHelper similarly buried itself deep in the system partition in order to survive device resets, and went so far as rewriting libc.so to prevent you from mounting the system partition to remove it. (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/solve...)
You are also underestimating the amount of damage malware can cause even within the sandbox.
- The CryCryptor ransomware abuses file access APIs to encrypt photos and videos on external storage and hold them hostage. (https://threatpost.com/emerging-ransomware-photos-videos-and...)
- The DEFENSOR ID banking trojan abuses accessibility APIs to steal login credentials, text messages, and 2FA codes. (https://www.welivesecurity.com/2020/05/22/insidious-android-...)
Even the majority of the adware you describe abuses system APIs to hide their own icons and draw their own ads on top of other apps. (Why Android even has an API that allows this, I have no idea...) (https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2019/10/08/icon-hiding-android...)
When it comes to malware, sandboxing is far from the panacea that some people seem to believe.
You are describe textbook anti-competitive behavior.
Using certain deals, to enforce exclusivity in this way, is a text book anti-trust violation (if it is determined that google has significant market power).
If a company has significant market power, then just can't do what you are suggesting.
In fact, I believe that Microsoft lost their anti-trust case, for doing almost the exact same behavior, of preventing preloading of other browser.
If they were serious about that they would mandate and enforce open source along the entire Android stack that has root privileges on any Play-store certified phone.
Ensure you have large quantities of alcohol at hand, then search for kernel leaks of a manufacturer that starts with M and ends with ediatek, and then look at the code "quality". And they are only the worst offenders...
Google has made the process of installing alternative app stores obtuse enough that general consumers might not do it. It's not that obtuse, especially to readers of this site, but it looks as though it's enough. There's also the restriction that app installs and updates cannot be done in the background.
Another possibility, or perhaps in addition to the above, is that the general public never goes outside of default app stores to search for games, or is never persuaded to do so. It's the path of least resistance to only use the one(s) included with the phone. Fortnite is the one attempt at a massive enough scale that could have broken this pattern, but it didn't, even though they had Fortnite on all the other platforms to use as an ad, which targets exactly the people most likely to jump through the hoops.
I do agree an average user would feel the warning intimidating, but I don't think it's obtuse (or do you mean obscure?) at all. If anything, it's pretty explicit.
If you try to install apk from say, your browser (the most likely scenario for Fortnite), the system would ask you to give it the privilege to install "unknown/unsafe app" or whatever it's called. And you only need to change this setting once. Later you can just directly install any APK from this app (browser).
This makes it near impossible to make an app store that competes with any system app store as you do not get 1 click installing or updating. Or for the app to even update itself. So a user who has 10 updates on a different app store would have to click through 10 install prompts just to update.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fdroid.fdroid.privileged...
2.b: "difficult to comprehend : not clear or precise in thought or expression".
I think that makes sense.
A tech savvy android owner wouldn't think twice about that. Anyone else (the vast majority of customers) would likely not continue, either because they're scared of something they don't understand (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, aka "FUD"), or because they're annoyed and confused by having so many popups which they don't want to read.
Whatever the case, the UI/UX flow of getting your product onto a customer's device is critical. It's why companies pay OEMs so much money to preinstall their software onto their devices.
Optimizing the customer experience is one of the most important ways to beat the competition. It's an investment that provides value directly to the consumer.
But Google is restricting competitors from doing that. If you want to compete with Google, you need to force all your customers through the Google-designed funnel of scary warning and repeated technical popups. This limits competition, and harms consumers.
They won't reach critical mass on Android, cause the game runs on very few phones.
The other issue is that Google actively makes it harder for an alternative storefront to operate on Android by forcing OEMs to only include the Play Store (though I think OEM's own stores might also be acceptable? not sure) if they want Google Play Services (which most apps require). Which means Epic can't go out and make a deal with an OEM to add the Epic Store (or possibly even just a single app like Fortnite that doesn't use Google's IAPs, not sure) to an Android device because said OEM would have to drop Google Play Services.
And they can't just tell you to download the store - there are limitations that you cannot bypass without being a system app (i.e. something preinstalled). The most notable one for a store being that it can't auto-update other applications.
That's not how Epic see it. Epic think the harm is that they are unable to do payments the way they want and smoothly run their own games store on phones. They even claim that Google is blocking them from making deals with phone manufactures about bundling their games store on certain phones out of the box.
If you pay too much you can capture that if you get a final judgement later. It’s not “irreparable” unless you go out of business, for example, in the meanwhile due that harm, so there’s no emergency requirement to compel the other party to do something right away.
>“The 30% of what you complain seems to be the industry rate, right?
Steam charges 30%. Microsoft: 30% ... If you go to consoles: PlayStation, Xbox Nintendo all charged 30%.
Physical stores: game shop, Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart all charge 30%. Apple and Google charged 30%.”
“it's all 30%, and you just want to gloss over it. You don’t want to address it,” judge YGR says.
Oof, Epic doing poorly on Apple’s 30% fee being excessive.
“There doesn't seem to be evidence to support what you're saying,” Judge YGR says.
> Physical stores: game shop, Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart all charge 30%. Apple and Google charged 30%.
How on earth is this not price fixing and/or oligopoly behaviour?
In physical shops you have a lot more capital invested, because that 30% feeds the retailer, the landlord, the construction company whereas the mobile marketplace has gobbled up two layers of the economy and charges the same rate with pretty insanely significant barriers of entry to compete.
It comes down to a question of monopoly and how much is too far which maybe everyone here has differing opinions on when that limit is reached.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...
100s of billions in 2020 seems off by at least an order of magnitude.
But if I wake up one day and see Bob set his price to $4/gallon while I'm selling for $2/gallon, I may decide to bump my price up to $4/gallon and that is not price fixing.
Realistically the 30% vig didn't come out of thin air - Apple set the standard, the rest of the world saw apple getting away with it, and decided that they would set their rates the same. But that doesn't mean price fixing resulted in all of us setting the percentage to 30.
retail stores have more costs than digital ones.
https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-budget/26214...
> In retaliation against Epic for introducing competition to Google Play Billing, and in furtherance of Google’s anti-competitive scheme, Google removed Fortnite from the GooglePlay Store. As a result, Epic suffered—and continues to suffer—irreparable harm to its reputation, goodwill, and competitive standing. Each day that Epic remains off the Google Play Store causes Epic unquantifiable harm because Google’s other restraints ensure that downloading apps outside an app store is threatening and technically challenging to most users,which prevents Epic from effectively distributing Fortnite to many Android users.
Epic only calls out their absence from the play store. They don't articulate any other harms. So, it's natural that Google would only react to this one harm, Epic didn't claim any others!
I think this supports the OP's phrasing.
Outside of Hacker News, this story seems dead.
It will be real hard for a judge to have to agree with them. They could have corrected it, got back into compliance and continued their legal case, but this was not the route they picked.
They gambled, and have (most likely) lost.
I'm under the impression that they had to do more-or-less what they did (minus the press blitz) in order to have legal standing to bring a case.
In this case, I think they are arguing that the harm occurs because "who decides if you can be on the App Store" should not be a monopoly, and users should be able to decide if they trust Epic to handle payments instead of Apple.
The argument is that the TOS itself is (or should be ruled), in its current form, illegal.
This case is particularly interesting, because it is clear that Apple + Google have a duopoly on a very important market, and both companies exhibit near-identical anti-consumer behavior in this particular respect. So while consumers may have a nominal choice, they do not have a real choice about a decision facet that matters. I'm curious about any anti-trust precedent here, and how this was handled in the courts. (i.e. two separate lawsuits against the companies in question, some sort of unified legal plea...?) How is (implicit) collusion handled?
They were paying the 30%. That’s harm enough.
Civil disobedience isn’t something courts deal with favourably. In a society with rule of law, they shouldn’t. It’s designed to get the public’s and legislature’s sympathy.
As such, I judge it poorly based solely on timing. In the middle of a pandemic and recession, in the midst of an election year, I suspect most Americans would be livid if the Congress prioritised a developer / tech giant compensation dispute.
It's interesting to think about this in the context of "smart contracts" etc. -- the rule of law is stronger if it is more unambiguously encoded.
If our current judicial system is deliberately interpreting morality, rather than encoding our sense of morality into the laws themselves, that seems like a rather obvious opportunity for advancing legal systems, especially in an age where we will be forced to codify human morality anyway. The check-and-balance can be moved to judging laws instead of individual cases, and a new system can be grown for bringing cases against laws instead of parties.
Apple's point, that the judge seems to agree with is "How can we be causing you harm when you did this to yourself?"
To provide a source for this: (ctrl-f escrow) https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1310618271675105282.html
They might still lose but the fact they broke the TOS won't count against them.
- Mobile is a tiny portion of fortnite
- Unreal engine is the long term money maker not fortnite
- The 40% owner (tencent) has lots of financial motivation to support this outside of Epic's potential profit, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were willing to pay the company off to make this lawsuit happen
0: They don't release numbers, but it's always consistently on the first page of Twitch game viewership https://www.twitch.tv/directory?sort=VIEWER_COUNT
2) Epic's endgame isn't Fortnite, it's the Epic Games Store. Tim Sweeney is a smart businessman, he knows that Fortnite's shelf-life is limited. He's seen Steam make an order of magnitude more money for Valve than its games. EGS would not only diversify Epic away from Fortnite, it would bring in far, far more revenue (not to mention tying up nicely with licensing the Unreal Engine to developers).
3) With EGS on the App/Play Stores, Epic would be positioned to capture literally billions of revenue. The potential reward is so large, it's worth throwing almost everything you have into the Apple/Google lawsuit.
Epic vs Google was covered in The Economist this week. It's a very big deal.
also, I similarly wonder what we are missing for google and apple to force websites to use their payment system and tax the 30% hell out of the entire economy.
And remember, no "sideloading" though brick and mortar stores!
WebGL 2.0 is at the level of OpenGL ES 3.0 (we are at GL ES 3.2 since years now) and has constraints in place due to security reasons.
WebGL 2.0 compute got a standard update last September, but there are no plans in sight to ever make it out of nightly previews, specially given WebGPU.
WebGPU still remains to be seen when it will be available, and in what form, if ever.
WebAssembly in 2020 is still trying to catch up with what Flash Alchemy allowed for in 2011.
To top this, even if you managed to make a cool 3D Web game in proper framerate, it can run like a dog in the customers browser in spite of their good native gaming experience, because the browser for whatever reason blacklists their GPU model and reverts back to either software rendering or not running at all.
"Unreal Engine 3 Support for Adobe Flash Player - Unreal Tournament 3" - 2011
Who is the court, or any of us, to say what should be the charge for selling a game on a marketplace? That's like someone telling you what your profit margin should be for a product that everyone wants. Why should it be tied to your costs?
I mean, in many cases it is, due to customer demand reasons, but there are tons of things that you pay for that have prices nothing close to what it costs to provide.
That's why I think it will fail in court at least (maybe not the SEC, or Congress). The argument that 30% is unfair goes nowhere in court -- so what should it be? Courts are not the forum for that question.
Anyway, I finish with snark: if Epic invoked its same logic on itself, clearly it should reduce its profit / subscription charges to a "reasonable" level. Epic is the only one I'm able to buy Epic games from -- clearly they're a monopoly and need to have their market-abusive behavior and extortionate pricing regulated? Right?
I find irony in many people who get probably so knee-jerk opposed to Google/Apple and "on Epic's side" will find themselves justifying why they should be free to set their own prices when they launch their next product.
It's not like Apple and Google can't move, there's like 200 countries, that's like a hundred times more countries than app stores
We don’t have laws that Apple is breaking. Almost all legal analysts agree Epic’s case is a long shot designed to attract legislative intervention.
Not really. Court cases are all about justifying why an action or inaction meets or fails a law. Legislation is all about justifying why a cause requires legislative action.
Exercising freedoms, for a person or group of people pursuing common enterprise, does not need to be justified. The moment it does, it’s not a right. And choosing how to price an unregulated inessential good outside emergency conditions is not activity Americans have to justify to their government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Tax_Freedom_Act
Reads like a joke now?
No, choosing how to price things is needed for modern capitalism to work which is why we have antitrust laws. The question you should ask yourself is "if the 30% tax is many times higher than what it costs Apple to deliver the service, what forces would cause Apple to reduce said tax?", if you can't come up with an answer then we need antitrust action here.
The cost of the service for Apple is irrelevant in this court case.
Your sarcasm about the flight of capital and corporations is maybe more right than you realize.
Sadly, maybe also the part about not having to justify its laws at all...
Oh, absolutely 100% positively 'not true' - the US 100% has to 'justify it's laws'.
While 'something should be done here' I don't think prices need to be regulated, rather, just opening up fair market conditions in different layers of the value chain.
Just making 3rd party apps and app-stores available on each platform would suffice.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shif...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_...
> After the Air Mail scandal of 1934, the U.S. government concluded that such large holding companies as United Aircraft and Transport were anti-competitive, and new antitrust laws were passed forbidding airframe or engine manufacturers from having interests in airlines.
Also if Boeing were allowed to create an airline they could, say, not sell airliners to any other airline, or charge them much more. Or just pass on the airliner sales margins to consumers as lower fares... until the other airlines went out of business.
But I guess the airlines could just make their own airplanes right?
Yes, there are "basically" two manufacturers of airliners if you define airliner as "planes made by Boeing and Airbus" and ignore... all the other airliners. Without CRJs, E-Jets and Q400s the US airline industry doesn't exist as it does today.
There are three airline alliances operating in the United States [1]. Of the top 10 airlines operating in the United States [2] only three are currently members of an airline alliance. When Alaska joins Oneworld it will be four.
> Maybe it would better if there was a vertically integrated airline company
Do you have a more compelling reason than "maybe" to suggest why changing these regulations back to a model that was already shown to be anti competitive would provide better service? [3]
> why wouldn’t it?
Because we tried it and it was found to be anti competitive. [3]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_alliance
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_airlines_of_the_United_S...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_...
I think it is safe to say that Airbus and Boeing hold a strong duopoly in their market segment—similar to Apple and Google in mobile actually. [0]
Yes you are right about the airline alliances.
> Do you have a more compelling reason than "maybe" to suggest why changing these regulations back to a model that was already shown to be anti competitive would provide better service?
Maybe there would be benefits to consumers if a manufacturers focused more on user experience? Maybe service would be cheaper. Maybe more planes like the 787 would be built. I’m not necessarily advocating for this, I’m just not convinced an anti-trust case from 100 years ago over mail delivery, before modern airlines existed, is a solid reason to keep the law in place
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_between_Airbus_and...
No, but this is to my point. The current airlines in the United States are trash and have been getting worse throughout my lifetime.
I don’t necessarily believe deregulation is the answer, I just don’t buy that this particular type of “trust” would be a problem for the market these days. Vertically integrated companies are successful because they are efficient and it seems silly to punish companies for achieving this
What is it specifically about airlines that are "trash" today? How was it better in the past?
Or both?
You also seem to assume vertical integration is the only way to provide a stable, secure and private computing platform. That is not obvious to me and I don't believe regulators could (or should!) arrive at such a conclusion.
The question for regulators is simply if the market is operating with sufficient competition.
Apple for example is not completely vertically integrated. They buy glass from someone else, and screens. I don't think they mine aluminum. Clearly it is possible to deliver their product by working with other companies they do not own. This means it may be possible for them to deliver a product with similar capabilities even after spinning off the app store as "apple apps co" which provides apps for "apple device co" but they may occasionally also make apps for "Samsung Device Co". This is further reinforced by the fact that the vast majority of apps on Apple's (and Google's) platform are not written by Apple.
Kinda like how Boeing and Airbus both buy engines from Rolls Royce and Pratt & Whitney (which used to be part of the same company as Boeing). Or even like how Apple buys processors from Intel but also used to buy IBM processors.
If consumers are willing to pay 30% more for guarantees of security, privacy, experience, then that's fine.
Imagine if MS and Apple today banned all Desktop apps out of their own stores or took a 30% cut. We would immediately rethink the issue.
With phones, this was the model from nearly the beginning, and everyone opts in, or chooses not to.
If "it was bad from the start so that makes it ok" was a great argument, nothing would ever improve.
A lot of industries were bad from the start and were regulated into much better versions. Everything from food to air travel to financial services was made into better markets for consumers through regulation. Mobile computing is just as essential today as those other industries and needs a similar shakeup.
The analogy here could be something along the lines of "device manufacturers cannot be in the business of content creation or distribution" or even "content distributors cannot be in the business of content creation".
I don't have a strong opinion on this, I'm just providing some historical context. I'm sure there are many more examples and interpretations.
Historically, computer hardware makers have both made their own applications -- not just system-level software and bundled utilities -- and distributed software others make for their platform for about as long as there's been computer hardware. Unless this was somehow so narrowly tailored to Apple that it couldn't apply to anyone else, it would be a seismic change.
(Also, I continue to be skeptical that forcing Apple to spin off the App Store is really a useful way to address the complaints people have. A separate company with an exclusive contract to run the App Store doesn't solve anything, and if you're going to force changes to make it non-exclusive, you can arguably do that without spinning it off.)
But the problem is very obvious. A 30% cut for something that is completely free on other computing platforms is evidence of excessive monopolistic power. This power is exercised by means of restricting what kind of software end users can run.
It is not hard to imagine several reasonable ways to restrict that power depending on how far you want to go and what tradeoffs to take. The only seismic effects would be to owners of walled gardens mandated by device manufacturers, i.e. Apple, Google, Sony, etc. – exactly those who are currently abusing their market position.
By their logic, all the supermarkets in my neighborhood are colluding on the price of tomatoes.
Steam has a 30% cut because it's so big that the smaller stores don't move the needle much. So there's no real market force pushing prices down, because the other offerings are just not substitutes. (Eg. there's GOG Galaxy, the other ones are too tied to certain publishers.)
It's the fact that both Stores do not allow apps that circumvent Apple/Google's payment systems for in-app purchases (and in Apple's case, the fact that side-loading is prohibited, forcing you to use the App Store for any software you want to run on portable Apple devices).
If you took a favourable interpretation, a 30% commission only becomes anti-competitive once Apple/Google take away any alternative.
That being said, I don't agree with that and I'm still not clear what the legal basis for that argument is. I'm leaning towards Epic losing this one mightily.
But to get there, their argument obviously can't be "Apple is a monopoly allows it to extract 30%, which is too high, so we want it reduced to zero". That's not going to work.
Rather, they get it to zero by saying "Apple is a monopoly and prevents competition by banning apps that implement their own payment processing system, so leave the 30% as-is but let any app implement its own payments".
So the actual percentage, and the restriction against accepting payments outside Apple IAP, are two slightly different concerns. Reducing the percentage to 20% would obviously be a net financial win, but it's definitely not their main objective.
If it's not easy, maybe you should think about why then. And not be so quick to dictate how things should be otherwise.
Multiple massive corporations with essentially unlimited funding and desire failed in this space repeatedly, some with enormous head starts. The thought that someone can simply start another mobile platform is naive bordering on absurd.
This is an established market that clearly can support only one or two participants. We have seen this movie.
It helps that the Google Play license would kill the existing product lines of any of the large phone manufacturers that tried. As far as I am aware courts seem to generally agree that Googles license is hilariously anti competitive in nature.
It's 'not easy' because the current monopolists will crush any attempt to take their turf - which is the whole point.
It seems like a lot of markets -- maybe most -- go through consolidation, and the more the market is one whose players benefit from network effects -- like, say, incompatible computing platforms -- the more rapid this consolidation is. Look at the personal computing market: there were a lot of players in the late 1970s and early 80s, and nobody was an obvious winner. Yet by 1990, the IBM PC already had over 80% of the market, Apple was struggling, and other once-major players were on the verge of bankruptcy or had thrown in the towel and started making PC clones. And none of that happened because IBM was "crushing any attempt to take their turf".
Frankly, I really didn't expect a repeat of that in the mobile space. It was clear to me in 2007 that the iPhone was going to be a big deal, but it wasn't clear to me that Android was going to take off the way it did, in no small part because I didn't expect everyone else to dramatically collapse in three years. One of the other players was Microsoft, for heaven's sake. Nokia was a market leader and had MeeGo almost ready to go (right? right?). Blackberry had bought QNX and were surely going to leverage that talent into a next-generation OS (right? right?).
The market as it exists now is down to two players, but this is kind of the confounding factor here: neither Apple nor Google got to their position in the mobile phone market by "playing dirty." Apple got there because people keep buying iPhones; Google got there because just about everyone who isn't Apple went with Android.
So supernova87a is, I suspect, fundamentally correct that we got to where we are now because of market dynamics. It's arguable that because the market now is down to two players -- and is orders of magnitude larger than it was a decade ago -- that there are antitrust concerns around app stores, although I think that's actually even more complicated.
As former Nokia employee, the whole Symbian vs Linux was a big deal to what happened, hence why the first Linux tablets lacked any kind of phone capabilities, despite us in internal road shows about future devices providing that as feedback.
The Symbian dev community, despite not being in love with Symbian C++, what spoiled everything was the continuous reboot in dev tools (Metrowerks with Perl scripts, 2 Eclipse based IDEs, Qt) and then came the burning memo telling them that the efforts to go through all those Symbian reboots were in vain, and it was time to start from scratch with .NET (Silverlight/XNA).
Microsoft, for rebooting the platform multiple times, PocketPC/Windows CE into the constrained Silverlight/XNA of WP7, followed up by a complete reboot for WP 8, yet another one in WP 8.1 to align a bit more the platforms (UAP), followed by the UWP rewrite once more when Windows 10 came out. Ah and in the process they failed to uphold to their promises of which devices would get the updates for the new OS versions.
Yet, despite all the dev and consumer anger in the WP eco-system regarding those decisions, they managed to slow and steady arrive to 10% market in Europe, which could have kept increasing if they were willing to bleed a bit more, while sorting out their politics.
Meanwhile Windows slowly owns the tablet market, at least here in Europe, everyone that wants a tablet with detachable keyboard and isn't willing to pay Apple prices, goes either with 2-1 laptops or convertible ones, which with the ongoing Reunion project roadmap means devs are back with a Windows 7 tablet programming model alongside an improved COM for the ride (yet another reboot to add up to the previous ones).
And this mostly because how much Google tries, most apps for Android tablets are just phone apps running on bigger screen, while Microsoft has learned to take advantage of their market share in laptops as the hardware turns into better tablets.
Nokia was optimized for another field entirely, it's rare that companies can pivot.
The issues you highlight are side effects of that.
They were already on Symbian before iPhone was even an idea.
And in what concerns Android, their phones (yes manufactured via HMD) are one of the best in what concerns updates, with their traditional hardware.
With one of the offices being the Espoo building that I visited so many times.
BlackBerry was an 'in between' and was really good at the killer feature 'email' but nothing else.
Microsoft was too late with a decent offer.
Nokia was a feature phone company that died with the feature phone era.
Calling devices with touch screens, C++, Java (ME + Symbian extensions), Flash, Python and a Web Runtime a feature phone.
Not only it is rediculous, it proves how little you understand Nokia's offering before iPhone was even an idea.
Nokia not only is alive, it owns Bell Labs nowadays.
The entered smartphone market as it was starting with $50B in the bank and unlimited resources etc..
The technology aspect of this is barely even relevant. If there was a market for 10 mobile operating systems, they would exist. They don't exist due to network effects making such systems DOA, not because it's technically impossible to create a good mobile OS. Simply put, no one wants or needs a new OS without a million apps for it. And no one wants an app store without a million apps in it.
This is very obviously the kind of monopolistic market that the government should be regulating. Too bad they've gone soft on such stuff in recent decades.
Do we really want to live in a world in which a few tech companies get to shave 30% off of all the value produced by a significant portion of the entire economy? Why should we put up with that? Because we made a rule a long ago that in general companies can decide their own pricing structure and device policy? Is a slavish adherence to this rule worth making us all 30% poorer? Why?
We can and should make an exceptionion to the general principle of corporate independence whenever we find ourselves in a situation in which a key piece of public infrastructure happens to be privately owned --- and app stores have definitely become public infrastructure). We shouldn't let a blind adherence to an abstraction prevent us from ensuring that this public infrastructure is run in the public interest.
An app store that sells games and voluntary entertainments is not a public infrastructure, operated in the public interest. That's almost laughable.
And don't be so quick to conclude that now because you reap the benefits of a system that was previously set up, you can simply decide that you think the % is too high and take it back "in the public interest". Go ahead, propose that every company only be allowed a 5% markup on its costs. Let's see where that takes us.
When you have a natural monopoly operating key public infrastructure, regulation is a clear and justifiable option.
The iOS and Google platforms have barely existed more than a decade, and the platforms + app ecosystem are constantly evolving. New platforms and app ecosystems are emerging too, with Facebook/Oculus, Valve/Steam, Amazon with Fire/Alexa, etc.
Enshrining today’s dominant app ecosystems as the government sanctioned ones will surely stifle their evolution and innovation, because that’s what declaring something a utility does: assumes there is no differentiation, so slow government regs / bureaucracy can control it.
I don’t believe Apple and iOS are the end of history of ecosystems. Atari wasn’t, Microsoft wasn’t, IBM wasn’t.
"Go ahead, propose that every company only be allowed a 5% markup on its costs. Let's see where that takes us."
In the case of Android, it takes us back to when Google previously had a 5% cut. They've done it before they can do it again.
What I pay an ISP is a monthly fee for them providing a service. I paid Apple/Google/manufacturer a fee when I purchased a device.
My ISP does not receive more/less in fees each month based on how much online shopping I do.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-ju...
[1] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...
They are monopolies, or more precisely, an oligarchy.
Mobile devices have become 'essential utility' not quite but almost like roads, internet access etc. and Google/Apple have absolute control.
Imagine if Verizon and AT&T said: "We're going to charge 30% of all revenue derived form Internet Usage".
What would be the difference?
Could we just 'refuse to engage' and 'not use the internet'?
We scream 'net neutrality' when it comes to network access, we need to recognize some of the same logic applies here as well.
Sometimes it's hard to demonstrate 'consumer harm' when we don't know what the market would look like otherwise: in Canada, literally up until the 1980's, the telephone system was a de-facto government monopoly called 'Bell Telephone'. You had to buy everything from them, they set prices etc. etc..
Imagine what would happen if iOS and Android 'banned' anything other than Safari and Chrome.
Imagine if theY forced Bing and Google only respectively as search engines and banned all others?
How would we react?
In much the same way Europe has required users have the ability to have the choice of Search, even default search, I think the minimum requirement would be to allow 3rd party apps and 3rd party app stores.
Well, mobile operators used to charge up to 80% on their Symbian, J2ME, Windows CE/PocketPC, Blackberry, Brew stores.
That falls under competition law. It's in a government's interests to encourage companies to compete with each other, and to prevent a single or a handful of companies explicitly or implicitly agreeing to control market pricing to the detriment of consumers.
In this case, both Google and Apple set the same 30% pricing, and clearly neither have any incentive to rock the boat and compete with each other, and every incentive to dissuade or prevent other companies from creating competing app stores. When competition in a market fails, it's up to the courts or government to step in.
"I find irony in many people who get probably so knee-jerk opposed to Google/Apple and "on Epic's side" will find themselves justifying why they should be free to set their own prices when they launch their next product."
Its not hypocritical (or even ironic) to say that there should be different rules for companies operating as part of an oligopoly, compared to small business competing in a crowded marketplace.
You would be ok with different tax rates for different size corporations?
A committee / agency to decide what is or is not an oligopoly? So, someone coming up with a new app that does something never done before, that would be a monopoly or oligopoly, right?
This is called our court system. And they have been handling anti-trust law for a century now. And they have done a pretty reasonable job of it.
Anti-trust law is not something new. It is well established.
You think that's what the courts are supposed to do? You have a serious flaw in understanding what courts are for if so.
No I am not! I am calling for the existing law, known as the Sherman Anti-trust act, to be enforced in the same way that it has been enforce for literally a century!
There are already laws that cover this! They have been around for literally 100 years. And our existing court system is more than capable of enforcing our existing laws, in the same way that they have been doing, for a literal century.
> You think that's what the courts are supposed to do?
Courts have already enforced the sherman anti-trust act, and have been enforcing it for 100 years. And they will continue to enforce it when violations come up.
> by the status and concentration of its market
I recommend that you go research anti-trust law, and how it is enforced.
The courts already use the "concentration of the market", in existing anti-trust law evaluations. They have been doing this for a century! It is entirely standard, in basically every single anti-trust evaluation, that has ever happened, to look at how concentrated the market is.
Absolutely. There is a cost to society when business is concentrated in a few large organisations. It descreases competition (which forms the bedrock of the capitalist system), and concentrates wealth (extracting it from local communities). It seems completely fair to make theae comapnies pay for that cost. If it means that they can't compete and get outcompeted by smaller companies then... good.
Markets have to be overseen by the state to some degree, because free markets rely on certain conditions being met in order to work optimally. One of these conditions is that the companies in the market must be competing.
> You would be ok with different tax rates for different size corporations?
You mean like how individuals are taxed at different rates dependent on the size of their income?
> A committee / agency to decide what is or is not an oligopoly?
We already have that: the court system. I'm not describing anything new here. Competition law in the US dates back at least to the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
> So, someone coming up with a new app that does something never done before, that would be a monopoly or oligopoly, right?
Having a monopoly by itself is fine; you just can't leverage that monopoly to artificially inhibit competition.
The role of courts is not of fact finder, market minder, or regulator. You should educate yourself on that topic before proposing stuff like this.
You would have to create an IRS-like body to determine the monopolistic status of every market, industry, company. And tell me, are you just concerned about big tech companies making 30%, or would you regulate grocery chains that make 4% just the same?
It's like people don't think of the details and implications of an idea before proposing that they've got the answer.
Companies working to create bottlenecks in society instead of removing them really is bad for everyone, so governments needs to step in to fix that.
https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-budget/26214...
Then what do you call United States v. AT&T? Or United States v. Microsoft Corporation?
> The role of courts is not of fact finder, market minder, or regulator.
It's certainly the courts' job to enforce anti-trust legislation.
> You would have to create an IRS-like body to determine the monopolistic status of every market, industry, company.
You mean like the FTC?
But again, it's not whether a company is a monopoly; it's whether they're engaged in anti-competititive practices to maintain that monopoly. The FTC and the Antitrust division of the DoJ investigate antitrust violations, not so-called "innocent" monopolies.
> And tell me, are you just concerned about big tech companies making 30%, or would you regulate grocery chains that make 4% just the same?
It doesn't matter how much profit a company makes, or how much it charges; it's whether or not it's artificially reducing competition in order to keep prices high. There's typically less barriers to entry to selling groceries, but its certainly not impossible for a grocery chain to engage in anticompetitive practices.
> It's like people don't think of the details and implications of an idea before proposing that they've got the answer.
You seem to be under the impression this is an idea I'm proposing, but what I'm describing is how competition law has worked for the last century.
Besides, our devices are computers. The next evolution of laptops for most people. We should be able to run whatever software we want on them. Google and Apple purposefully acted like mafia to keep them as locked down as they could, while they both benefited from the web and open source to rise to and ultimately cement their position.
Fuck them both.
This comes down to what I call competitive capitalism VS Hobson's Choice capitalism. Android doesn't really have any competitors - Amazon, Samsung, they have zero legal access to the apps on the Google Play store unless they go through Android. As such, if they refuse to allow competitors to force them to compete, they have a responsibility to compete despite the lack of competition and if they refuse to do that it's the government's job to beat them until they comply.
Again: the problem here isn't "freedom", it's competition. Your next product probably doesn't have a major captive sub-market.
But let's address the " freedom" argument: what I call Hobson's Choice capitalism. "If you don't like it, you're free to rewrite the OS from scratch, then convince every single app on the app store to switch over while starting with no hardware support and no app support. This is a Hobson's Choice - it's not about making an improvement on Android, it's about making a unilateral improvement on the entire universe just to push Android forward. It's absurd and not a real choice.
But more importantly, if you consider Hobson's Choice capitalism to be capitalism, then technically the government is equivalent to a private corporation as long as you can forfeit your citizenship and move to Somalia to be free of your country's obligations on you. This basically contradicts the standard definition of the free market, but that's the point - everyone rejects the Hobson's choice out of hand, because it's just so absurdly irrelevant to competition.
So let's talk about competition: would Google rather take a lower cut, or legally permit Amazon and Tizen to access Google Play apps from their non-Android OSes?
Because right now, they're not competing. They're just sitting on their chicken-egg problem based laurels.
As for Epic: I sort of agree with your pejorative - copyright is intended to provide funding, but the right it actually grants is the right to deny a copy. Some companies simply sit on copyright they never actually intend to monetize, and others keep hold of it far longer than they need to make a healthy profit proportionate to its success. The notion that all copyright needs the exact sake period is also absurd, as some industries are much more fast-moving than others. I think we need to take a long, hard look at copyright monopolies, starting with the absurd "lifetime plus 70 years" duration.
If it wasn't run by a complete and utter dickhead I may have more sympathy.
Is there some particular reason you don't like Tim Sweeney beyond his failure to be a diehard Linux crusader?
You don't have to be a "diehard Linux crusader" to see that dropping support from a platform because your store doesn't support it is a shitty move. Running the Windows version of Linux software via Wine isn't support.
Would you really believe that such behavior would not break anti-trust law? Because the courts already ruled against microsoft in a much less extreme situation.
And furthermore, are you really OK with that behavior, if microsoft forced every single windows PC in the world, to disallow unapproved apps?
> The argument that 30% is unfair goes nowhere in court -- so what should it be?
The lawsuit has nothing to do with the 30% cut. Instead it has to do with Google and Apple engaging in anti-competitive behavior, and using their significant market power to prevent competition.
They should not be forced to change their price. Instead, they should be force to stop their anti-competitive behavior, and allow other apps to be installed, in an easier way (in Apple's case), where as Google should be stopped from forcing OEM providers to not preload the epic app store.
> why they should be free to set their own prices
It has nothing to do with price setting. That is nowhere in the lawsuit. Instead, Epic is trying to stop anti-competitive behavior.
If a monopoly is created and enforced by the state, it is their duty to regulate it.
They do if they want to be on the mobile market, as evident by them being kicked off 98% of the mobile market when they decided to not engage in it.
(Yes, I know Android marketplace is Google's but what we'd think if MS did the same with Windows, charge a cut of every transaction. Don't like it? Too bad, no one is forcing anyone to use Windows)
IMO, There was already an open, accessible, free app store called - 'Internet Browser' upon which Internet was built. These companies undermined it in collusion with the duopolies to hoard more data from their customers and are now crying wolf.
So, the answer they are proposing now is creating a monopoly to fight the duopoly?
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/30/indian-startups-explore-fo...
Not that Apple has zero data on their customers, but the difference in quantity (and intrusiveness) is likely off by a factor of thousands.
For example Apple Maps has no sign in, does not retain your searches, and uses E2E encryption for syncing. Very different than GMaps.
App marketplaces must be a public good and under the surveillance of the public and not controlled by a few old chief executives of Google or Apple.
Sounds lucrative.
Pick one! But if you pick monopolist, don’t expect regulation to necessarily go the way you want it to. It probably will preserve everything you hate about the current system, just replacing Apple with a bureaucracy.
Forcing the return of the Wild West of the PC ecosystem Into mobile will only happen when consumers demand it. They won’t, because that wasn’t a very user friendly approach. It Was originally for tinkerers and hackers and that pedigree continues to this day. Mobile carriers and government aren’t likely too fond of the idea of phones where anything can be installed on them.
These companies were user friendly at first, but as all companies do, they are slowly squeezing the profits out of everything they can.
They are steering us towards a local maximum that ends in them taking a massive chunk of the money from everyone forever, for no benefit to anyone else, simply because they're sitting on market inertia.
People could eventually demand something like that "Wild West" you speak of, because it is the solution that fosters competition and prevents the monopolies from abusing their power.
But I think there is something preventing that from happening - the companies in charge are spending vast amounts of money on PR to convince the public that their monopoly situations are not really so bad. And, I think as a result, they've got folks like you defending them.
I’m defending them because I have seen enough history to not want the alternative for our mobile phones, and also because most folks here are very flawed understanding of antitrust, monopoly and rents. None of those laws as traditionally interpreted and enforced apply to this situation.
They’re free to extract 30% because that’s the holy grail of what businesses are and have always been about, taught in every business school for the past 50 years, and how commerce laws were structured: crafting a sustainable competitive advantage that still benefits consumers.
One could argue Epic is trying to demonstrate Apple and Google are basically Visa and MasterCard. ( That is purely my guess, personally I dont see Epic has planned a decent, long term strategy other than simply charging into battle ) And in EU Visa and Master had to lower their CC processing fees from their 3-5% in US to somewhat sane %. Similar case in AUS as well.
I wonder if Tim Sweeney saw the opportunity from DHH / Hey.com, decided to take a bet and jump onto it. Simply judging the flow from Twitter and people within his own circle. ( or Bubble )
I actually have no problem with Apple or Google charging 30% for gaming. I do have problem with Apple charging business like Fitness class, Online Email Services, Education or all other Services simply for access through their Apps. Had it been something like 5% to 10% I think everyone would have been happy to pay. It was estimated 80% of App Store revenue were from Gaming. Apple could have lower their non-gaming cut without substantial loss of services revenue stream.
But it seems there are large enough group of Americans thinking Apple can charge whatever they want. It is their platform.
Why differentiate gaming and non-gaming? The platform should be blind to the content and be a platform.
I would also argue that a platform can curate, but the platform should not lock-down the user from escaping the platform. For example, side-loading should be a legal right that an owner of a device should have.
Fuck whatever contract you signed, actively breach that contract, claim some faux-high-ground, while you’re completely fucking over the people who actually use your rickety-ass malware-as-a-service “app store”...