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Comment by DangerousPie | Hacker News Reader

If a company sells coffee both in a shop and on the street it would have to charge 43% more to the in-shop purchaser to get the same revenue, even though the user gets exactly the same experience.

Would you call that a tax or would you call that rent?

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If there was only one entity owning all the houses, and to operate a business you needed space, then the terms rent and tax would be practically interchangeable

One entity doesn’t own all the buildings though. Google, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, etc all have their own malls and properties you can go to to get your Fortnite. It’s up to the customer which they go to.

If iOS was a monopoly, how is it possible to get Fortnite on all these other platforms? That just doesn’t make any sense. The only monopoly Apple has is on selling and licensing their own products.

Fair Point but I from the viewpoint of someone who has already purchased an iOS device, Apple is the only mall. That is the problem, not the existence of the stores themselves. In the case of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo they do operate the same kind of platforms which are equally scummy in my opinion, but honestly not on my Radar as I don't really play console games.

In the case of Google I would like to disagree, if only for the fact that I have options as where to procure my software and run it in a manner that is intended, but I must concede that it is more cumbersome that I would like. That is the key difference that makes what Apple does so egregious, and why I don't really have much problems with Google at the current time.

For me it is not about the fees or the stores, its that Apple in practice forbids anyone in the digital marketplace to do business with any of their consumers unless it goes through them, as they own the app store and for the average user, their devices only run apps that are on the app store. Epic is in no position to reject the proposition of using Apple's payment service or their store entirely and still do business with the million of customers that are playing Fortnite.

Apple should be definitely be able to charge for the access to their App store customer base, but Epic should be allowed to reject that price and still be allowed to do business with the iOS user base on their own terms, just like they did on Android with side loading before striking a deal to be on the Google Play store.

It’s just seems to me that supporting the installation of software on a computer and managing installed applications is a feature of the system. Those features are products of the manufacturer or software vendor. What would legislation restricting or mandating those features look like? Who would draw up and certify compliance with the requirements? What impact would that have on innovation or the development of new products? How would compliance against a standard set of requirements work for new and different platforms?

I’m personally opposed to Apple locking down MacOS to run only signed binaries. If they go too far with that I’ll stop buying Macs, but to what extent do I get to dictate to Apple what software they develop, what products they choose to sell and how they decide to implement them?

On balance I think it’s a good thing the US and EU are looking at these issues. Clearly at the moment there is at a consensus and I think there is a legitimate role for oversight of how these companies operate and enforce the rules on their systems. I’m not convinced though at forced openness on every platform of any kind is tenable.

I agree that it is finally good that not only the governments but us as consumers are looking at this issue. I would hope that this entire debacle will result in a shift in perspective for enough people and legislators that Apple will just give us the right to run sideloaded applications without more (or hopefully less) effort than on the Android platform. If i remember correclty, microsoft tried to emulate Apple by only allowing windows store downloaded applications on their ARM version of windows initially but yielded after backlash (and probably poor sales).

I wouldnt call it trying to dictate what Apple does.Also I would like to specify that I don't really wanna dictate what software Apple develop or what products they want to sell in their store(atleast beyond whatever code is necessary for sideloading). What I do take issue with, is Apple dictating which companies are allowed to do business with "me" as a consumer, should I be on their platform.

Walled Gardens has not been the norm of Hardware/operating system platforms in the pc/laptop market, and I don't think it should be that way on mobile either. All of the major OS vendors could have implemented similar walled gardens if they wanted to, they just couldn't get away with it. I hope this leads to Apple not getting away with it either.

At least you are calling Apple's behavior what it is: rent-seeking.

Well, kind of...

Conventionally, rent-seeking is a poor quality activity which doesn’t generate any new wealth, it just transfers it.

But that’s not the case here, at least from my perspective, as Apple invests huge amounts in developing their hardware and software and millions of developers around the world (ok, maybe thousands, I don’t know) and their families have benefited from this.

It’s not like they’ve inherited a vast real-estate portfolio that was amassed through violence and war (see British aristocracy, est. 1066) and have invested relatively little into it.

I’m not sure why this is being downvoted. A huge consideration into whether Apple is truly anti-competitive should be if this has caused harm to consumers.

How is harm measured, exactly? I feel harmed when a company makes huge margins on me from something.

> I’m not sure why this is being downvoted. A huge consideration into whether Apple is truly anti-competitive should be if this has caused harm to consumers.

Prior to the 1980s, monopolies were considered bad (or at least extremely dangerous and suspicious) by default, and leveraging one to privilege your entry into another market was a huge no-no (though I'm not sure leveraging a monopoly to create a monopolized adjacent market would always have been seen the same way).

Robert Bork's theory of "consumer harm" as the guiding light of anti-trust enforcement (and further conceiving of "harm" mostly in the form of higher prices, or at least "value for money") has given corporations too much wiggle room and consequently led to a lot of contorted legal and economic arguments, substantially reducing antitrust scrutiny and enforcement (which was the whole point, AFAICT).

It kind of is like rent seeking though. Apple has developed a product with some software but not the software we call Fortnite. They are now acting similar to a company like ExpressScripts, who created an organization in the form of a platform so they could extract rents from both the drug makers and the (insurance company) buyers. If Epic keeps the game off iPhone, there’s some overall loss to consumers. If they keep prices the same but pay the Apple fees, they pay rent to Apple. If they raise prices across the board to compensate, consumers pay rent to Apple and there is some deadweight loss because of a likely reduction in demand.

I'd say the difference is that the tax is not uniformly charged by a middleman. If a mall made its profit by charging 43% on every purchase, I would think of it (informally) as a tax.

But suppose that mall didn't charge for anything else? Electricity, water, security, gravity all came free, and you just paid only if you made a sale? (Ok, there's a $100 developer fee and the cost of a Mac and iOS device.)

Maybe Apple should offer two deals to publishers: 1) Pay £1,000,000 up front and keep all the revenue 2) Pay As You Earn.

I don't think that works: The customer gets vastly different experiences because in a shop you're benefitting from the rented space's protection from weather, etc.

The same is true in the case of the iPhone vs. Desktop + web experience: it's different. One way that highlights the added benefit of the iOS app store is that it's safer than the open web.

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