How long are we going to allow the 30% apple tax to continue? See the recent patreon debacle for how it hurts people (not to mention the 30% being eaten as apple as well...).
You could switch from using Google's web products today. Literally.
How long are we going to allow the 30% apple tax to continue? See the recent patreon debacle for how it hurts people (not to mention the 30% being eaten as apple as well...).
You could switch from using Google's web products today. Literally.
It is difficult to compete with 'free' services where people pay with their privacy / time (for watching ads). Large masses cannot afford all these subscription-based models, and if then: households need to chose.
Amazon does this too. I pay 5 EUR a month, and get Amazon Prime Video, I get free S&H on Prime articles, and this makes me more inclined to order from Amazon. Meanwhile, if I order from AliExpress for more than 10 EUR, I get free shipping. Same story: stimulates me to buy more (or wait till I have more to order). With Apple, people are within the walled garden and circumventing that isn't allowed outside of EU.
Small businesses cannot do free/cheap shipping, as they don't have any large volume discounts. So what they do is sell their item on Amazon (and in NL, Bol.com) for a little bit more than their own shop. Either way, they have a tough time to compete. On service perhaps. Amazon has been terrible with warranty on expensive items to me. But if it is within a month I've been able to return the item, with no hassle.
For better or for worse, that's not how these things work.
Each antitrust case is almost wholly independent, with the only things that connect them being potential precedent set by previous ones, and any evidence or testimony that comes from one company to hang the other.
While it would surely be satisfying to see one big rollup of "big tech antitrust breakups" announced at once, and while it would help to mitigate the potential of breaking up one company to strengthen its rivals, our system just isn't set up to allow that sort of thing in any fashion.
If you want Google to be broken up, you have to support Google being broken up without knowing if Apple will even lose their antitrust case, let alone what the remedies might be. (Not, of course, that our opinion has any significant sway over these things in the first place!)