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Comment by andyferris | Hacker News Reader

Seems like sideloaded apps will require notorisation from Apple and some form of automated security/privacy scanning (plus a system for authorising alt stores to do the same).

Payment fees for App Store apps seem to be affected in section 9(c) - I have trouble parsing it but it seem to eliminate any fee difference between purchasing physical goods through an app (currently 0% fee) and digital goods (currently 30% fee). There's a carve out for "reasonable costs" for hosting and distributing the digital goods - this could be sensible in certain scenarios (like Netflix asking Apple to a free CDN for them).

We'll see how much malicious compliance the above produces. Otherwise I'm feeling like a happy Aussie today :)

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As an Aussie, I hope Apple maliciously complies to the greatest extent possible until the same rules are applied to all companies equally. And I mean ALL. Every single computing platform with any kind of loadable software developed by any third party should be similarly unlocked.

If the rules are good enough for Apple, they are good enough for everyone.

This might sound like a defence of Apple, and to a small extent it is. But actually, I’m being deadly serious. I think the world would be a better place if these rules applied to everyone.

“But poor Nintendo” rings as hollow to me as “but poor Apple” probably does to you.

I'd be happier if Apple willingly complied, and the rest of the companies were brought to heel next. It sets a cleaner precedent for smaller antitrust cases.

I’d be happiest if they were all brought to heel at exactly the same time. We don’t need precedent, we need legislation.

Australia has legislation. Competition and Consumer Act 2010, which seeks to prohibit market damages and unfair denial of competition.

Apple is the largest abuser that I can think of. If anyone else approaches their damages, I trust that they will be treated accordingly.

(FWIW my day job directly involves that Act.)

Beach's ruling determined that Apple should not be allowed to block, as a policy, competing app stores. Beach also recognised that Apple's commission is not merely a payment-processing fee, but a means of recovering its investment in the broader ecosystem, including developer tools, security, app verification, distribution infrastructure and intellectual property. He also acknowledged Apple's entitlement to a commercial return on those investments.

The question remains how Apple can get the commercial return which Beach acknowledged Apple is entitled to, given the weirdly arbitrary restrictions defined in Beach's order. This contradiction is left unresolved and is begging for an obvious overturn on appeal.

I personally have no problem with competing stores, so long as they're not just a mechanism for redirecting money previously going to Apple into their own pocket. But this ruling doesn't establish competition, because there's not competitive reason for alternative stores to exist except to avoid fees which Beach acknowledged Apple is entitled to.

This is a good point.

I think the legal side of it is, once a precedent like this stands, the cost of going after others reduces significantly. One could argue Nintendo created a closed market for Nintendo apps and abuses their monopoly power in a completely analogous way, and ask the court for completely analogous recourse.

A _better_ solution though would be legislation around freedoms and rights for general purpose computing on any general purpose computing device, rights to repair owned hardware, rights to "own" software paid for, etc. Then you wouldn't need to rely on any monopoly-abuse arguments. The powers that be would have to give up their control (e.g. governments like the notorization thing because they can ask Apple to stop something they consider harmful from being distributed easily, but the requirement to seek notorization clashes with what I perceive as my right to run any program I want on any computer I own) and to be fair having some way to protect the (non-techie) public from malicious software is a reasonable goal (where we could argue over different solutions).

> There's a carve out for "reasonable costs" for hosting and distributing the digital goods - this could be sensible in certain scenarios (like Netflix asking Apple to a free CDN for them).

The way this should work is that Apple can charge whatever they want for whatever they want but then nobody can be required to use them instead of a third party. So if they want to charge 30% to distribute your app then that's fine, but then you have the option of having someone else distribute your app to customers with iOS (or hosting it yourself), in which case Apple gets 0%.

At which point they might want to get e.g. 5% of something rather than 30% of nothing.

You can't argue that 30% is reasonable when your competitors want to offer that same service for 3% (transaction fees).

The goal is not to make them argue about it, it's to make them actually subject to competitive pressure so that if they try to charge an unreasonable fee, it's really easy for anyone to go with someone else.

Yep, the ruling seems to cover exactly that plus stopping Apple themselves treating in-app purchases and subscriptions (from actual App store apps) differently to how they currently approach physical goods (which are already allowed by Apple to go via other payment channels without any fee, or a developer might choose to go via ApplePay with possibly slightly less effort).

I agree, the end effect should be them charging say "5% of something" and the developer choosing not to bother thinking about external payments. They seem to avoiding this outcome on purpose though. (I dare say Apple might prefer to chase advertising revenue from the app store rather than accept small fees, but they'd risk trashing their own garden).

The word "reasonable" in Aussie laws is everywhere and it just gives work to hordes of lawyers to debate about its interpretation in courts.

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