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Comment by emsy | Hacker News Reader

It will be fun to see how tech companies will react when they get to taste their own “my platform my rules” medicine.

ah wow this is a brilliant sentence! I never saw governments as platforms but they DO ARE! In fact I was always critizing Apple App Store 30% by saying: "What is the App Store a government that can charge me a 30% tax?" and in fact my fear is the reconstruction of a DIGITAL FEUDAL SYSTEM.

Where there is a King that charge a tax and then there is smaller and smaller nesting of feudal lords that charge other taxes.

KING US Government charging 20-45% income tax

  DUKE Apple charging 30% App Store tax
  
  DUKE Google charging 30% Google Play Store tax
  
  DUKE Microsoft charging X% Microsoft Store tax
    
    MARQUEES Spotify/Netflix/Airbnb charging a fee for their platform

I think we need to be careful to not smother the fire of innovation which brings social mobility across classes/income groups. If we allow Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook to suffocate the innovation coming from the smaller companies we might find ourselves into a new medieval/dark age period with a lot of zero sum games and hierarchy and little innovation.

The economist Yanis Varoufakis elaborates on this. I think he makes a good and important point, and is incredibly smart and knowledgeable. But I also think this view of economy and corporations is too total. In the end these things are symptoms.

> KING US Government charging 20-45% income tax

> DUKE Apple charging 30% App Store tax

Note that Income tax is in reality earnings tax (as expenditures are generally subtracted), while Apple/Google fee is based on just income.

*Marquis

Both Marquess and Marquis are correct so I guess I merged them into Marquees XD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquess

In Italian, which is my native language, it would be MARCHESE.

Fun fact, there is a whole Italian region called Marche: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marche

Further fun fact, still in Italy, the territory around the city of Treviso is called La Marca since medieval times (and still today): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Treviso

<MARQUEE>, instead, is an ancient HTML abomination.

Yep, that's where the term 'Marquis' comes from. He's the one supposed to guard the 'marche' (stair in french) which in latin used to mean frontier.

Seems like you are arguing that Apple should be able to choose which government it wants to run under when using the France platform.

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