It's already kind of unfair that these services don't pay fees:
- YouTube Music doesn't pay fees on the Google Play Store
- Apple Music doesn't pay fees on the Apple App Store
- YouTube Music doesn't pay fees on the Google Play Store
- Apple Music doesn't pay fees on the Apple App Store
I wouldn’t have the same sentiment against YouTube music or Apple Music, because these are explicitly part of the same companies that host the marketplace.
I mean, ultimately, if you run a marketplace without posted rules and only let your friends and your own self succeed, aren’t you at a minimum sort of cheating? Like a Vegas house who claims fairness but the house gets special odds?
These walled gardens need to be opened up.
Apple/YouTube music not having any platform fee does give them an unfair advantage. Not sure how they rank in their own app stores in music categories though. Android user here so YouTube comes installed by default and even Yt music. Not sure if Apple music comes pre-installed as well. If it does, it does give another advantage to Apple.
A few years ago, I worked on a video game published by Microsoft. We ran game servers in Azure, and on Windows for obvious reasons. The project had to pay for the windows licenses from MS, despite being entirely funded by them, partially developed by an internal studio, on aMS first party IP.
I don't recall how much it cost exactly, but the cost of the per-core windows server license hourly is not far off the cost of a core on AWS these days.
Also, my experience of working in games is that the developers are exclusively windows. The backend services might use other OS's, but all the game development happens on Windows. When this was going on, I don't think a single developer in our room would have know the first thing about Linux.
> Especially for game servers where Linux is in it's element.
I think you'd be surprised at just how many games use Windows servers :)
“Paying” for accounting purposes, and “paying” where the payer loses access to the funds has different consequences.
For example, Apple and Alphabet can account for YouTube and Apple Music paying App Store fees, but leadership can ignore the fees for the purposes of selling a loss leader. Spotify cannot ignore the fees, since it would run out of money to pay other bills (or negatively effect net income).
https://www.protocol.com/amp/amazon-bad-at-games-2646952917
Neither is Disney ignoring transfer cost between Disney Studios and Disney+.
Management accounting takes into account opportunity costs.
>Individuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this year, the company [Microsoft] was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month.
Who knows if Apple is earning a profit on its Music + Classical Music apps or whatever else it bundles into its products. Maybe they consider it to be a small enough loss to offset the chance that a customer buys an Apple One bundle, which then makes up for the loss because the margins on cloud storage are much higher.
Streaming music is not like streaming TV.
Your cellphone maker shouldn't be eating into Hollywood's business.
Your online Walmart is making Lord of the Rings.
And you pay a 30% fee just to deploy your software into their walled gardens, which they monitor, remove the customer relationship, and make you jump through hurdles. If you are successful, someone can pay to place ads in front of legitimate searches for your brand.
Edit: Can't respond to comments anymore after being downvoted, so my response:
> Where and how is the line drawn? Should a cellphone maker be eating into map maker’s business? Laptop maker’s business? Camera maker’s business? A secretary’s business?
Perhaps when there are more than two vendors for one of the most critical pieces of technology for modern civilization.
Perhaps when you can deploy apps without taxation, control over distribution, unfair competition, scare tactics, or adversarial ad placement.
Right now the two vendors wield absolute control over one of the most essential societal functions. It's almost as bad as if they controlled the internet itself.
Where and how is the line drawn? Should a cellphone maker be eating into map maker’s business? Laptop maker’s business? Camera maker’s business? A secretary’s business?
If this happens a lot the department bearing the cost is usually compensated with a bigger budget.
My department at AWS “billed” by AWS when any of us set up our own internal AWS accounts.
I work for a very large enterprise also and we've been instructed to stop internal billing for everyhing less than 10k, and everything above 100k must be compensated in other ways, like shifting of responsibilities or personnel between teams. This was done because various departmental interests were basically trying to 'make money' at the expense of other internal departments and creating a complex mesh of internal contracts that was only wasting a huge amount of overhead :)
The problem with this thing is that it can become a goal of its own and some departments think they are making a ton of money even though they're only shifting internal funds and causing huge expenses in finance.
Tell that to antitrust lawers.
The company I work for owns several hotels, which are managed by another company entirely owned by the parent company.
When I stay at the company's hotel for a business trip, they pay the same fee everybody else pay.
It would be both unfair competition and tax fraud to do otherwise.