[bmandale]

"""

919. The comparators available to us (the Epic Games Store, the Microsoft Store and Steam’s lower headline rate) suggest that the competitive rate of commission would be in the range of 12 to 20%. We do think it is reasonable to make some adjustment to that range to accommodate the points made by Apple about its premium brand, the quality of its offering and its established market position. However, we do not think those would be sufficient to displace the upper end of the range and are likely to operate mainly at the lower end, where the offerings are arguably less attractive to users for those reasons.

920. Applying again an approach of “informed guesswork”, on the basis of the evidence before us, we find that the likely range of Apple’s Commission for iOS app distribution services in the counterfactual is between 15% and 20%. For the purposes of quantifying the overcharge (for both the exclusionary abuses and the excessive and unfair pricing abuse) we will use the mid-point of that range, which is 17.5%.

[awillen]

Thanks for digging that out.

[shuckles]

TLDR: they made it up.

[criddell]

What else would you expect?

It’s from a tribunal. They make judgements.

[shuckles]

Judgment can be grounded in reality or it can be picking a random subrange of a list of somewhat random ranges and then picking a midpoint because why not.

[bondarchuk]

It cannot be grounded in reality precisely because it's a monopoly. The whole point of laws against monopolies is to let the market figure out the fair rate, or to define the "fair" rate as the one that emerges in a competitive market. So by definition of what the whole case is about it is impossible to give a fair rate in this case. If you don't want to be subjected to guesswork, stop being a monopoly and let the market figure it out.

[bmandale]

What would you expect them to do in this case in particular?

[shuckles]

Consider Google Play, for starters.

[bmandale]

Google play has a dominant market position as well and is presumably next for this sort of ruling

[troupo]

They have a literal section "(6) Description of the “comparator” platforms" where the very first item is "(a) Google and other Android platforms"

There's a section "112. On 10 June 2022, the CMA published the final report in its MEM Study, which contains a number of findings in relation to both Apple and Google."

It's amazing that you never even tried to read the actual document but already immediately assume a position that is trivially proven wrong.

[IshKebab]

What else would they do?