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Comment by guax | Hacker News Reader

I think the difference is that amazon is not a platform. You sell on Amazon because it is where everyone is and they did that by burning lots and lots of cash to ensure everyone margins cannot be larger than a paper atom.

Now that they're trying to capitalize on it they're becoming worse as a store and I can't remember last time I used them (in NL).

If you buy an iphone there is no one to compete, Apple does not have to play the low margins game because there is no other game in town. Amazon does not take 9% if you sell somewhere else and does not care if you sell cheaper elsewhere, Apple does.

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> If you buy an iphone there is no one to compete

This. The problem is not the 30%, the problem is that iPhones do not have an option to buy apps from, lets say a Amazon Store or Epic Store.

That has been the style of argument made to regulators so far.

However then people get shocked that Apple says ok, we've rolled out the ability for third party app stores, we still review all the apps before signing, and the store owes us a 20% commission.

They haven't rolled out the ability for third party stores.

Yes, people are shocked. Apple's provisional approach to legislative compliance isn't working, their indifference towards public opinion is what brought antitrust regulators onto the scene in the first place.

Their App Store monopoly is the most literal definition of anticompetitive bundling in the 21st century; they're tying the primary product (Apple hardware, software, APIs, etc.) to a secondary product (the App Store) that can be offered from multiple competitors.

Again, this is what I think people get wrong when they talk about anticompetitive bundling.

Apple will continue to take a cut to make apps for the phone. The App Store and in-app purchases are how they take their cut today.

The bundling is anticompetitive against the potential market for third party payment providers and third party app marketplaces, sure. However, decoupling it is independent of reducing Apple's high fees. Apple will continue to charge a substantial fee for their part, even if due to regulatory compliance they offer less services to developers.

Someone would need to make a legal case directly against the fees Apple charges. I suspect that is a very challenging thing to do - least of which because they have never raised rates. The fees Apple collects have been the same since the first app was sold for iPhone, and the success has grown under that framework.

I don't expect the fees to go down. If you decouple Apple from the iPhone app distribution network, they can charge 100% fees for all I care. That is an entirely separate charge from the $99 developer registration fee, which they can also change to reflect their "SDK cost" or whatever. That's why ultimately, I don't care if Apple charges outrageous fees for their ecosystem. As long as competitors have equal access, there's no captive market to exploit.

What I expect is that, for the first time, Apple and their App Store partners will be forced to reckon with user choice. Their business will have to change if their success is predicated on a neverending source of R&D funding from payment processing revenue.

Which is, in this context, like Amazon taking 9% if you buy something from Ebay.

> like Amazon taking 9% if you buy something from Ebay.

If it's shipped via Amazon.

But also if people didn't have mailboxes, they just had Amazon Boxes or Ebay Boxes, and if you had an Amazon Box they explicitly forbid you from shipping anything to it with any other delivery company.

And also if we were talking about software rather than physical goods, and there were about a thousand other complications that made it not quite a 1:1 metaphor.

> Amazon does not take 9% if you sell somewhere else

So we do sell on other e-commerce platforms and you’re never gonna guess what their fee structures are.

(Basically the same as Amazon’s)

But there's actual competition underlying this fee structure, since the users can easily move from Amazon to e.g. eBay or really anywhere else in search of some item that they want. The only lock-in that Amazon might have on them is Prime membership, which the users have to actively opt into.

Whereas Apple could start charging 50% tomorrow and still have all the major apps in the store because of their market dominance position combined with ecosystem lock-in and walled garden.

> Amazon... ...does not care if you sell cheaper elsewhere

I can't find a good source for it, but Amazon is very sensitive to prices for the same goods on other sites. My understanding is they automatically match lowered prices on a number of competitors. They are also getting sued by the FTC[1] for punishing sellers that sell lower elsewhere.

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-amazon-forces-customers-...

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