The point of the discussion is absurd, do whatever they want with the Store

[AlexESP]

Over the last few days, I’ve seen many people arguing that 30% is a fair share, and because of that, Apple shouldn’t be legally enforced to change their rules. If it’s fair - we can have that discussion. But what we should be really defending is that a government shouldn’t decide how Apple manages a platform. No matter if the fee is 30, 90 or 0%.

iPhone OS 1.0 didn’t have third party apps at all. Apple could have sticked with that decision, because of i.e. security. Or make a totally different concept and even exclude Safari. That’s not the case - they have an App Store as the only place to install apps, for whatever reason (profits, security, a mix a both, etc.), with certain conditions. Devs can voluntarily join that private business, and/or complain that the rules are not good. But it’s the Apple private sphere.

Even people who support acting against monopolies shouldn’t support this, the field of application should the public sphere, and Apple has less than 20% global market share. An analogy with retailers: it would be absurd to enforce a company with 40% market share to sell some products when they don’t want to do it. And don’t get me wrong, I’m also against what regulators did to Microsoft and Explorer.

We like Apple with its upsides and downsides. And we’d want them to change some things, but that’s their offer as a company, and we can’t and shouldn’t decide for them. I’m free to leave any time I want, and I actively don’t like Android’s approach to download third party apps outside the Play Store, but that’s what the market offers and I’d stick to it.

 

[gwhizkids]

The local grocery store gets a cut of the items it stocks on its shelves. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t be in the business. Not sure how this any different.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Agreed. Monopoly law was intended to prevent a single company from dominating a market, such as the Rockefeller's control of over 90% of the petroleum business. That was also the justification for the antitrust actions against Microsoft. The problem in either case wasn't whether they controlled 90%, but their actions when having that market share - using that advantage to strengthen/expand their control; to make it difficult for other businesses to compete.

Monopoly wasn't intended to apply to minority or co-equal players in a field, on the theory that healthy competition will reign-in excesses.

There are a few ways to look at the current situation with App Store. One is that it's a retail store. The proprietor can decide what to sell and not to sell. A supplier can't come to a retailer and say, "I'm going to put my goods on your shelf and you're going to pay me 100% of the selling price" (well, I've heard that's sometimes done by criminal gangs... but that's why they're called criminal gangs). The retailer and supplier have to come to terms on the wholesale price, etc. If the retailer doesn't want to buy at the price demanded by the supplier, the retailer doesn't have to buy. If the retailer doesn't think the goods are suitable, they don't have to carry them at all.

In the case of iTunes and App Store, Apple is a sales agent - they don't buy the goods outright, they withhold a sales commission when the goods are sold. The principle still applies. Sales agents don't have to sell goods they don't want to sell. Agent and seller have to come to terms on the commission rate, etc. The government does not intervene.

So, when a developer or service refuses to pay a commission, why should the sales agent agree to list those goods for sale? Whether that commission should be 30%, 15%, 5%... that's a separate matter. However, any business that expects to not pay commission for services rendered by a sales agent is living in a fantasy world. It's a cost of doing business, like a landlord who hires a management company to find tenants, collect rents, etc.

Now, the one place that anti-trust law might conceivably come into effect is in a case where the retailer is selling its own goods as well as goods produced by others. Private label merchandise, in other words. So, Apple TV+ subscriptions vs. Netflix, Apple Music vs. Spotify, etc. However, even there, Apple does not control all the distribution channels. Apple's ecosystem is just one of many places those subscriptions can be sold and used. Apple's policy is, essentially, "You're free to distribute an app that allows your subscribers to access your service on our platform, but if you do so, you have to give us a chance to sell some of those subscriptions and profit by having made those sales." If the developers/service providers haven't built such costs into their selling price, it's not Apple's problem. Back when I was in book publishing, we didn't expect to get 100% of the cover price. The cover price was set so that the book distributors and booksellers could each take their mark-up. We got less than 40% of the cover price of the book. That's nowhere near as good as the 70% that an app developer gets from Apple.