[the_solenoid]

All of these policies coming about are for the benefit of already monied interests and do not help small devs, or consumers.

I also take huge umbrage that the framing of this is just as horrible as the framing of paying taxes in the US.

People think, wrongly, that they make $100k, and have to pay 35% of that to the gov.

Wrong. You always only made $65k. There are studies that show wages have always tracked with taxes (up to a point).

Think of it this way - if your taxes went up to 75%, would you still work for 100k? No. Your take home would track in a few years (or sooner) to bring you back up to taking home 65k.

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So I am nexflix, I charge 9.99 and pay whatever entity processes my payments like 1-2% if even. There is some other costs to this - infrastructure and employees, probably a bunch more.

Apple comes in and says "we build, and maintain a platform, that costs us x amount to maintain, and we sell 100's of millions of devices that utilize this platform, and provide fairly long-term support for those devices. We want you, if you want access to this platform, to pay y% of revenue derived from using this platform. We will call this the apple tax.

Is this fair? If you think taxes are theft, you probably think, "no". But you are wrong. Taxes are the % of your "output" used to keep the commons going. You know roads, bridges, laws, money, military, water, clean air, safe food, yadda yadda.

So the apple tax might be high, but it's mostly irrelevant. As a small dev, you would never have the reach you can have with the app store anywhere else. As a big dev, you look at where you can generate more revenue and think "fuck apple, let's start making legislation so I can use their platform but make more money without paying into it."

These "solutions" are just monied interests wanting more profit. This should only be handled in a way that suits the interest of consumers but they are not at the table.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

A related concept in economics is the Laffer curve [1], which describes the tax rate that extracts the most money from the population. If you tax everyone 1%, you collect very little money, and if you tax everyone 99%, very few people will work at all.

Interestingly, the sweet spot seems to be in the mid-30s for the population in aggregate (which lines up with Apple's fees almost exactly), but is someplace around 70% for the highest earners. This implies you could jack up the top marginal tax rates to > 60%, and while most billionaires may grumble a bit, they will not ragequit from the economy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve#Income_tax_rate_a...

[xondono]

What?

Google and Apple are giving them devs access to something they built. That is not a tax.

“Taxation is theft” is a very simple concept. If I don’t pay my taxes, people with guns come to my house, even if I don’t use public services. If you don’t want to pay Apple or Google, go develop for other devices.

[simondotau]

Everyone uses public services, even if they don't ever interact with them directly. For example, it's the Government which decides whether it's you or someone else that owns your land.

[malandrew]

> Taxes are the % of your "output" used to keep the commons going.

The commons includes bombing other countries and waging unwinnable wars?

I have no problem paying taxes if they were actually used for the commons, but only a fraction are used for the commons. Far too much is going to benefit special interest groups such as defense contractors, public sector employee benefits and pensions that are far above what private sector employees get.

[simondotau]

Move to a better country.