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Comment by danielmarkbruce | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, that was a joke. I should have lathered on more obvious sarcasm. The DOJ don't understand very basic computer security. It's disgraceful. Agree with everything you say here - the antitrust regulators seem to have forgotten who they are supposed to be protecting - consumers, not apple competitors.

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Ok, but about the percentage fee?

If Apple removed the transaction cost entirely, then there wouldn't be much complaint.

That absolutely raises prices and effects consumers.

If Apple takes a 0% fee, or allows other competitors some way of charging 0%, that would obviously benefit consumers.

The fee is paid by card issuers. It's 0.15% for cc and 0.5 pennies for debit cards. Card issuers take a large chunk of change in interchange fees, this is a tiny, tiny proportion of it. Even if they managed to pass the cost on (which they almost certainly cannot given the nature of that business), spread across it might be 0.00000x % increase in costs. And, it's quite likely to actually reduce costs for card issuers due to reduced fraud and reduced physical card issuance (those cards actually cost money to produce).

> t's 0.15% for cc and 0.5 pennies for debit cards.

So in other words, it's not 0%. Apple takes a cut.

Instead, it should be 0%.

That's how consumers would benefit. If it were 0%.

> The fee is paid by card issuers

This is a point addressed by any introductory economics class in high school.

It's called tax incidence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence

And once you get into grad school they teach that those nice little graphs you drew in high school and undergrad were simplifications of the real world, and whether costs are passed on or not is very dependent on the specifics of the market. And then you hit the real world and realize, it's even more complex again when the costs are felt for some subset of transactions and not others, there are multiple parties to a transaction, etc etc.

Often, a high school education is not enough.

So then they found a magic way of inventing free money that conjures money from thin air, without any costs being passed down, according to you.

If they figured that out, then why not set the price to 1 million dollars per transaction?

Zero percent of the costs aren't passed down according to you.

With the extra tax revenue from this magic money machine, we could solve the national debt problem overnight!

Yes, exactly. Free money from the sky is exactly it.

It's definitely not coming out of card issuers pockets, from their fat interchange fees, that they may be happy to pay due to reduced fraud and other costs. Nope, the free sky money thing is it.

That high school education is serving well.

I question the governments decision to include this in the complaint. Surely Visa's 2-3% fee has a greater impact on the wider economy than Apple's 0.15%.

Visa's take isn't anything like that, it's close to 0.10%. The vast majority of that fat fee you refer to goes to the bank who issued the card.

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