He presents some good arguments:<p><pre><code> The issue is not whether the rate is 30 or 15 or 10 percent, the issue is that the rate is arbitrary and they get to set it unilaterally because they’ve insulated themselves from competition ... What we’re saying is they actually prevent competitors from coming in and offering alternative payment systems, and therefore there is no market ... Let the market decide. Enable PayPal and Mastercard and other new payment systems to come in and then let users decide, vote with their dollars on whether Apple’s technology is so superior when it comes to payment and all these other things that they’re willing to pay 30 percent more.
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That's an excellent argument that I fully support as a user - I am very averse to pay any unnecessary percentage for an an app or service as Apple Tax just because Apple has locked down the system for precisely that. It feels like extortion. More than that, the indian banking system provides various methods of digital payments all of which are better than Apple Pay as they also protect my financial privacy - and it is telling that Apple deliberately doesn't support any of it in India and demands and accepts only a credit card.<p><pre><code> The market is not operating. And people assume it has always been like that. “You kind of knew what the rules were when you came in.” And that’s when I stop them and I say, “Well, no. That is not historically correct. It wasn’t always like that. It wasn’t like that when we joined the App Store.”
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As a developer and user this is another valid concern - companies seem to have adopted the attitude that they can change their terms and policies arbitrarily and at their whims as and when they want. The recent WhatsApp privacy policy change is a good example of this. As is Apple's with every new OS release. This definitely requires regulation.<p><pre><code> They say, “Well, but we built it.” Yeah, you built it. But when you built it it wasn’t like that. It was significantly built on the backs of the work of many app developers that came to the App Store that you touted as the reason why people should come and use your platform. ... it really doesn’t matter from an antitrust perspective. … The biggest cases in the history of antitrust enforcement in the US had to do with companies that had built that infrastructure and then used the power that that control gave them to hurt competitors.
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Again an excellent point - the Apple platform is what it is because we developers add half the value to it. And yes, after a certain point when a company has grown large and starts abusing their users (developers and users) they need to be regulated.