[gimmeThaBeet]

I wouldn't say I have trouble considering this issue, I know what my opinion is. The ramifications feel uncomfortable because Apple is the Goliath, it feels bizarre their behavior should need defending.

The idea I get hung up on is Apple doesn't control the market, they control access to the customers companies want. And those customers made a free choice to enter apple's ecosystem. They could get an Android, they could get none of the above. The game consoles have had an incredibly locked down marketplace. nintendo had to basically build their brand on it in the wake of atari in the 80s. Why do mobile marketplaces get such additional scrutiny? The orders of magnitude more money? The pervasiveness of mobile devices? The utility of the devices?

The area where I do struggle is the apple tax, they don't pay it while everyone else has to. My reflexive feeling, is that if you can't provide 20% value over what apple can provide, there might be intrinsic issues; your product might be a commodity. But for something like spotify, where the service exists way beyond the iOS platform, it seems wild that apple get 20% of anything that goes through its platform.

[xenadu02]

How is that any different than Nintendo's first-party games? They don't pay a license fee to themselves (and such an action would be a pointless accounting fiction if they did).

When you buy a Switch it means you can only play games Nintendo has approved. Unlike the app store, the policies are much more restrictive there. Random Joe can't put a game on the Switch. When you develop for the Switch it means if you have a game similar to a Nintendo game _they won't sell you a license and your product is dead in the water_.

People love to forget: The App Store was the first major distribution mechanism where anyone can join the program, no pre-vetting required, and so long as you obey the rules you can sell any app you want. Prior to that every distribution mechanism (sans selling it yourself on the web) was far more discriminatory, restricted, and took a bigger cut of your sales.

[gimmeThaBeet]

That's the point, the behavior doesn't seem different, but the levels of scrutiny aren't even comparable, that's the question. Does the behavior matter as much as the size of the market in which the actor is in. Do people care because, apple is large, because the addressable app market is large, because politicians have iphones but don't give a toss about a mario game?

[judge2020]

> they don't pay it

There's not much they can do in this regard; they might actually pay the Apple Tax in the accounting sense, but the tax taken goes into the same bank account. They can't take less money from the $10 Apple Music charge since the tax has to go somewhere, and they can't just charge less money for their services since that would just be changing the price for the users, making competition even angrier about Apple undercutting them.

The Apple tax is 30% by the way.

[yyyk]

IMHO, It should be more than that.

Apple does not control a market, but it controls a marketplace. Perhaps the fact that Apple's marketplace isn't the largest by most measures allows it to set rather market-fixing terms to the stalls it allows others to put in it, perhaps that's ok.

But once the other stalls paid their legal due to the marketplace owner (i.e. assented to the various terms, as unfair they may be), they and the customers have a justified expectation that competition would be fair from now on - the default is fair and free competition, and inasmuch as the other stalls haven't signed their rights off, these must be respected.

Now if the marketplace owner would then put in further roadblocks to make the other stalls hard to find and his stalls easy to find, despite that not being in the original terms, that should be not legal. As far as I know, nowhere did Apple reserve the 'right' to hide other due-paying apps and promote its own in searches.

For that alone, Apple's behaviour should be banned outright, even if it is their marketplace. If Apple can constantly alter the deal, than no stall or customer can be safe. The long term process would then be in favour of eliminating competition, both internally in Apple's marketplace, and in general as vendors flee to the largest marketplace since it is regulated by law. That's not in the public interest at all.

[damnyou]

Good job answering your own question! Mobile platforms deserve more scrutiny precisely for the reasons you mentioned — the utility, the power, the importance.