> Apple and the publishers had worked out an agreement to raise the price of ebooks to be closer to that of new releases to counter the monopolistic cheap-to-the-point-of-failing-authors approach from Amazon.
Thats called anti-competive behavior to raise prices.
Price dumping isn't a thing. Its basically not illegal, and is instead something that the US government, and its population, want to encourage.
I am sure that there are some outdated economics textbooks that put out this hypothetical of the extremely rare "bad kind" of price dumping, and one or 2 long irrelevant court cases. But these days, its basically not a bad thing.
Complaints about price dumping are almost never done in good faith. Instead, they are done by monopolistic entities that want to screw over customers by illegally coordinating price increases.
> Basically, that decision by the government was wrong, and we’re all suffering for it.
I am going to say that the monopolistic group of sellers who were trying to raise prices was wrong. And the law supports me.
> But if you want it to be zero, start taking on the PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch monopolies, too as they charge as much and sometimes more.
Or, instead of that, we can use the government to force it to be zero in whatever ways that we can, even if we don't effect other markets.
Those other markets, while maybe deserving of some scrutiny, are smaller than the smartphone market. Therefore, it is perfectly reasonable to care about the much larger and more important market, and to make those fees 0.
> letting Tim Sweeney / Epic get involved in taking payment details, because I trust him far less than I trust Tim Cook / Apple
Then use your consumer rights to not install the epic app store. And leave other people's phone's alone.