[jerf]

Oh, you can do better than that. You'd pay 30% on the mortgage, the seller would pay 30% on the mortgage, the title company would pay 30% on the mortgage, the listing agent would pay 30% on the listing.... my point here not merely being sarcasm, though it is that as well, but it isn't scalable to have every little person involved in facilitating some transaction trying to take 30%.

[nomercy400]

You mean like how the title company, listing agent, mortgage broker, notary etc. all take money from the simple transaction that should be just between buyer and seller? Same idea.

[lotsofpulp]

You are free to hand a willing seller a few hundred thousand dollars in cash and submit the updated deeds to the county.

Just be ready to deal with any problems yourself.

[jerf]

Generally they are taking money roughly proportional to the value being added. You may grumble, but as lotsofpulp also points out, you're welcome to do it yourself. If you didn't, you were presumably still OK with the money being spent. The existence of a reasonable self-serve option keeps the fees reasonable; they can't charge literally 30% of the mortgage for these fees because then everyone would just do it for themselves. (And some of those people would get good at it, and open new businesses that did it for you for a more reasonable price.)

There is some inherent subjectivity to "roughly proportional to the value being added", but in my opinion, it becomes reasonably objective at some point when the value isn't being added. Not 100%, but reasonably so. I think part of the problem with Apple's policy here is that it is another example of trying to jam too large a set of cases into the roof of one policy, a pervasive problem right now with many Silicon Valley-style businesses that try to substitute expensive human insight with cheap computer code for economic decisions. There are perhaps cases where 30% is justified, because Apple is providing that much value to the target transaction. I'll leave that to the reader to decide.

But there are clearly other sorts of transactions that were going to take place anyhow, and it basically just happens to be taking place through an app. Apple did not introduce any significant number of people to Coinbase by putting the Coinbase app on the store. It does not provide a huge amount of service to Coinbase on a per-transaction basis; Coinbase has the financial infrastructure, the technical infrastructure, etc. One way you can tell Apple is not terribly involved is, what are they responsible for in this case? Not very much; even if Apple totally vaporized and all Apple services disappeared, the user could still perform the target transaction on a different platform with virtually no effort. Contrast with the answer to "what if Coinbase totally vaporized and all their services disappeared?" This transaction would become impossible.

For a transaction like this, where Apple did no marketing, where Apple provides essentially no irreplaceable technical service, where the transaction can trivially be done elsewhere and it is just happening to occur on Apple services, where the value flow doesn't need to involve Apple at all, a 30% charge seems outrageously large.

I think some of the problem in debating this, and arguably all the way down to people understanding this, is that both these cases exist simultaneously, and they are both "true". There are apps that exist and thrive only because of Apple infrastructure, services, and promotion. 30% doesn't seem unreasonable, at least in the abstract. But other apps don't have anything like that service or support from Apple, but get hit with the exact same fee. This is the sort of thing that really starts to look like monopolistic rent seeking. (Or at least oligopolistic rent seeking.)