[newsclues]

Remember when software was sold in a box with a paper manual in a store? Before App Store and steam, retailers and publishers of games and software also took their share of the revenue from the work software developers created. Their cut wasn’t small.

If the government stepped in to regulate the sales of software (to protect developers and consumers?) do you think: A) apps will cost less B) the government won’t want their cut

[freedomben]

Yeah but there was a big difference: As a developer you could opt out of that distribution and go your own way. I knew people who sold floppies out of their garage. IBM or whoever made your hardware, and Microsoft or whoever made your OS, could not prevent your users from installing your software on their machine.

[willtemperley]

Gov't taking a cut from tha App store is already happening [1] and it's a legitimate concern unlike the concept of Apple taking cuts from people's salary (LOL).

[1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/02/12/app-store-and-japanese-co...

[direwolf20]

So they aren't exempt from sales tax in Japan, and they're crying about it?