[wmeredith]

Apples and Oranges, my friend. The highway and the USPS are funded by tax dollars. The App Store is a culmination of Steve Jobs and co busting their collective asses for decades on their own time without any mandatory help from you. Now they're going to charge you an arm and a leg for the privilege of using it. If you don't like it, you're free to take a stand with your dollars and go elsewhere.

[invertd]

Using Apple products is not mandatory, of course...but the real question is whether a 30% cut is a fair number or the methodology itself is fair to being with?

[kbutler]

Oh, that's why I didn't have to pay for my iPhone, then.

[wmeredith]

You're precisely correct, You did not have to pay for your iPhone. You chose to.

[kbutler]

Yes, I chose to pay for the phone. Apple chose to sell the phone at a price they felt adequate compensation for their "decades" of work.

Apple is currently seeking to leverage their monopoly[1] on the iOS platform by extracting additional rent[2] from content providers.

Their probability of success directly correlates with their pricing power.

Is this rent-seeking good for Apple customers? Unlikely. Is it legal? Depends on how the FTC views Apple's pricing power.

kb

[1]In economics, a monopoly exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly)

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent