5 ms·

Hacker News readers are a pretty biased sample of people -- they generally have direct interests in lowering commissions paid because they run businesses paying

Hacker News readers are a pretty biased sample of people -- they generally have direct interests in lowering commissions paid because they run businesses paying such commissions. And advocating that any platform provider is a monopoly restricting free exercise of selling goods. Often, the arguments will be phrased in terms of "should" or "fair" or "can't". But this is the oldest position in the book and is a fight that comes naturally with commercial activity -- everyone wants to not have a middleman, and fight against it. The question is, are you entitled legally to have some certain % charged to you? As a matter of "fairness"? Is a platform that controls access to a fraction of mobile device software sales an exclusionary monopoly? Has that prevented you from selling software elsewhere, or exercising your trade as a programmer? I personally (and I have no financial interests either way) think the issue is not as principled as some people make it out to be.

jedimind 6y ago
> Hacker News readers are a pretty biased sample of people That's a vacuous statement. Is anyone working at Apple or benefiting from Apple's monopolies any less biased? The essential question is rather if such behavior is fundamentally anti competitive and contrary to the spirit of the law. Why was Microsoft's installing Internet Explorer on their own OS a cardinal sin worthy of punishment, while Apple is getting away with behavior far worse than Microsoft's, yet it goes unpunished, so they get encouraged to behave even worse. I guess it's all about proper lobbying nowadays.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  As a consumer of mobile apps, I'm generally farther removed from the argument, and not going to benefit from the decision either way. Are you going to be charging me less if Apple gave a discount on your app commissions? App developers are highly likely to claim that the platform is monopolistic because they would benefit from such a decision. And argue from a "principle" point of view, when really all it is is a price dispute.
  - jedimind 6y ago
    > Are you going to be charging me less if Apple gave a discount on your app commissions? Not necessarily, but developers will have a higher margin, which will allow them to continue developing their apps and increase their quality, because they don't have to waste their time thinking about X ways to increase their tiny margins of the product, so they can survive for a little bit longer. >App developers are highly likely to claim that the platform is monopolistic because they would benefit from such a decision. Apple is highly likely to claim that the platform is not monopolistic because they would benefit from such a decision. See? the statement can be easily inverted, again it's a vacuous statement. Is their behavior anti competitive and in violation of the spirit of the law? That's the essential question.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      They also don't have to waste their time doing sales infrastructure, like many J2ME and Symbian developers used to do.
- twblalock 6y ago
  > Why was Microsoft's installing Internet Explorer on their own OS a cardinal sin worthy of punishment It probably wasn't, which is why the government didn't follow through with the breakup of Microsoft. Shortly after the government claimed that Microsoft was a monopoly that could not be competed with, Microsoft was outcompeted in a number of areas that the regulators never anticipated, including Google Chrome taking over the browser market, as well as other areas Microsoft directly competed in such as search and smartphones. It makes you wonder, how can a company be an unassailable monopoly yet get its butt kicked by other companies competing in the same market?
  - greedo 6y ago
    <Shortly after the government claimed that Microsoft was a monopoly that could not be competed with> The DOJ sued Microsoft in the mid 1990s. Chrome came out in 2008.
    - twblalock 6y ago
      The courts ruled that Microsoft should be broken up in 2000, and the case was settled without a breakup about a year later. The cases in the early 1990s were not even about the web browser, which did not exist yet -- they were about Windows licensing agreements from the 1980s.
      - greedo 6y ago
        So again, Chrome was released in 2008, seven years after the settlement. There was no ready alternative to Explorer at the time of the settlement.
        twblalock 6y ago
        Netscape Navigator and Communicator, Mozilla (the original one), and Opera all existed at the time and were trivially easy to obtain.
        6y ago
mthoms 6y ago
Good points. I think the thing that irks people is Apple's bullying. They just don't seem to be operating in good faith. For instance, from the report, here are Apple's "Anti-circumvention Policies": >2. “Multiplatform Services: Apps that operate across multiple platforms may allow users to access content, subscriptions, or features they have acquired in your app on other platforms or your web site,... provided those items are also available as in-app purchases within the app. You must not directly or indirectly target iOS users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase, and your general communications about other purchasing methods must not discourage use of in-app purchase.” Apple is dictating what I can tell my customers in "general communications" where Apple is not involved. That's not a free market, it's abusive. If a customer comes to my site from a search I should be able to say "Here are the purchase options. Please note that Apple takes 30% if you purchase through their store. If you purchase direct, our processing fees are only %2.5". In that statement, I'm not making any judgement call on whether Apple is good or bad. I'm simply stating a verifiable fact. If the value proposition of Apple's store has benefits to the consumer then its merits should stand on their own. For the record, I believe the App store offers many solid benefits to consumers. I'm just saying we should let the consumer decide if the benefits of the App store outweigh their other chosen criteria. TL;DR Apple has no business inserting itself in my customer communications on my own website so long as I only state facts. Edit: This is from the perspective of say, an eBook author or MacOS developer. I realize that iOS apps can only be purchased through Apple so the point there is moot.
- Despegar 6y ago
  >Apple is dictating what I can tell my customers in "general communications" where Apple is not involved. That's not a free market, it's abusive. If a customer comes to my site from a search I should be able to say "Here are the purchase options. Please note that Apple takes 30% if you purchase through their store. If you purchase direct, our processing fees are only %2.5". Everyone that argues against the rule that says you can't advertise in your apps ways to bypass the App Store for payment are basically arguing that they should be able to free ride on the platform, something discussed in this study. >In addition, for their business model to be successful, digital marketplaces often have to rely on rules that prevent customers from free riding on their services. Free riding involves buyers and/or sellers avoiding fees after the platform has helped connect them, which means that the platform is not compensated for the successful match and the use of the platform’s technology, tools, and services to facilitate and promote valuable transactions between buyers and sellers. A review of the policies and rules of large app stores and online marketplaces that distribute physical goods and services — marketplaces for which the risk for free riding is particularly high — shows that digital marketplaces routinely forbid behaviors aimed at avoiding fees. >In addition to the commission on paid apps and in-app purchases of digital content, services, and subscriptions, Apple imposes guidelines that govern the use of the App Store. Among those policies are rules about in-app purchases to prevent users and developers from free riding on Apple’s App Store services and investments. Apps cannot explicitly steer app users away from in-app purchases — for example, by providing external links that bypass the App Store.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> And advocating that any platform provider is a monopoly restricting free exercise of selling goods. It's not any platform, it's a platform which actually has a monopoly. Amazon is a "platform" for selling boxed software but they haven't got a monopoly on it. You might make a few extra sales from being on Amazon than not, but even most of the sales you make through Amazon would only be diverted to Walmart or Best Buy or your own website if your software wasn't for sale on Amazon. If they insisted on paying you 30% less than competitors, you would make more by refusing them and then losing 10% of those sales while 90% of them get diverted to other distributors who take smaller cuts. Which in turn prevents them from doing that, because getting the normal distribution margin in a competitive market is better for Amazon than getting nothing. That isn't true for Apple because there is no diverting those sales to a different distributor because there is no other distributor. You can sell a Windows app to the same customer with a Windows device through any number of distributors, but nobody but Apple distributes apps to iOS devices.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  It will turn quite heavily on what is the market in which you assert a monopoly exists. There certainly are alternatives to someone developing mobile apps -- Android, others. The more narrowly you define it, of course you can make anything seem like a monopoly. Whether that narrow market is truly what is in dispute, is the question. But you should listen to Thiel's talk on this -- is a restaurant that is the only British food outlet on Main Street, Springfield a monopoly over the British restaurant industry on Main Street?
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > is a restaurant that is the only British food outlet on Main Street, Springfield a monopoly over the British restaurant industry on Main Street? Which brings you to the question of substitution. If the only British food outlet on Main Street, Springfield raises prices by just a modest amount, does that cause a significant number of customers to take their business elsewhere? If so, they haven't got a monopoly and the "elsewhere" is part of the same market, which in that case would presumably include restaurants serving different types of food or which are still in the same general vicinity. So what's the substitute for the App Store? If they raised prices, could developers switch to Google Play instead? Well, no. Developers need both at once because they each reach different customers. If Apple charged too much a developer might abandon the iOS market entirely and use only Google Play instead of using both, but none of that business from the App Store could get moved to Google Play because those customers don't have Android devices and Google Play doesn't distribute iOS apps. They would just have to lose all of that business, not substitute Google Play for the App Store by moving the customers over there. Compare this to where you stop selling your boxed software to Amazon but continue selling it to Walmart and Best Buy. Most of the people who would have bought your software on Amazon still want it, so they just buy it from some other place. The same customers. Your iOS customers can't do that because nobody else distributes apps for their devices. Also notice that they did this on purpose. Suppose the owner of the only "British food outlet on Main Street, Springfield" is also a landlord who owns 20% of the land in the city. They don't have a monopoly on land, but then what they do is build a wall around the portion of the city they own, so that it's a two hour drive around the wall to get out of their domain. Then the competing restaurants that had been "one street over" are on the other side of the wall, which puts them in a different market (can't substitute them anymore), so now they've got a restaurant monopoly.
saurik 6y ago
To me a core problem is that the market is segmented into a handful of oligopolies. People sometimes say "can't you sell your software elsewhere", and while I can sell a chair at another store, if somehow chairs had to be compatible with tables and somehow there were only like two or three kinds of table in the world and all of them had this weird chair restriction and it was all based on weird artificial interoperability barriers... I just don't think the people who thought through these laws--even the DMCA (which is all about this stuff and wants it... but only so far! it has explicit exclusions based on principled stances taken by congress that are now obsolete) and even the people at the EFF who try to fight it (based on my work with them and extensive discussions with some of their people on our shared projects)--considered what asymmetric encryption and tamper proof module digital rights management technology does to competition (where the case law and legislative intent had always been that these kinds of restrictions should not have much merit: see Sega v. Accolade as a landmark case, wherein Sega hadn't no right to try to lock Accolade off their platform _and everyone liked that and consisted their lack of such right to be important for competition_ and yet now you can build that lock out of encryption and no amount of reverse engineering is guaranteed to break it and all of the assumptions that "software interoperability" is even possible have been destroyed).

jedimind 6y ago

> Hacker News readers are a pretty biased sample of people That's a vacuous statement. Is anyone working at Apple or benefiting from Apple's monopolies any less biased? The essential question is rather if such behavior is fundamentally anti competitive and contrary to the spirit of the law. Why was Microsoft's installing Internet Explorer on their own OS a cardinal sin worthy of punishment, while Apple is getting away with behavior far worse than Microsoft's, yet it goes unpunished, so they get encouraged to behave even worse. I guess it's all about proper lobbying nowadays.

supernova87a 6y ago
As a consumer of mobile apps, I'm generally farther removed from the argument, and not going to benefit from the decision either way. Are you going to be charging me less if Apple gave a discount on your app commissions? App developers are highly likely to claim that the platform is monopolistic because they would benefit from such a decision. And argue from a "principle" point of view, when really all it is is a price dispute.
- jedimind 6y ago
  > Are you going to be charging me less if Apple gave a discount on your app commissions? Not necessarily, but developers will have a higher margin, which will allow them to continue developing their apps and increase their quality, because they don't have to waste their time thinking about X ways to increase their tiny margins of the product, so they can survive for a little bit longer. >App developers are highly likely to claim that the platform is monopolistic because they would benefit from such a decision. Apple is highly likely to claim that the platform is not monopolistic because they would benefit from such a decision. See? the statement can be easily inverted, again it's a vacuous statement. Is their behavior anti competitive and in violation of the spirit of the law? That's the essential question.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    They also don't have to waste their time doing sales infrastructure, like many J2ME and Symbian developers used to do.
twblalock 6y ago
> Why was Microsoft's installing Internet Explorer on their own OS a cardinal sin worthy of punishment It probably wasn't, which is why the government didn't follow through with the breakup of Microsoft. Shortly after the government claimed that Microsoft was a monopoly that could not be competed with, Microsoft was outcompeted in a number of areas that the regulators never anticipated, including Google Chrome taking over the browser market, as well as other areas Microsoft directly competed in such as search and smartphones. It makes you wonder, how can a company be an unassailable monopoly yet get its butt kicked by other companies competing in the same market?
- greedo 6y ago
  <Shortly after the government claimed that Microsoft was a monopoly that could not be competed with> The DOJ sued Microsoft in the mid 1990s. Chrome came out in 2008.
  - twblalock 6y ago
    The courts ruled that Microsoft should be broken up in 2000, and the case was settled without a breakup about a year later. The cases in the early 1990s were not even about the web browser, which did not exist yet -- they were about Windows licensing agreements from the 1980s.
    - greedo 6y ago
      So again, Chrome was released in 2008, seven years after the settlement. There was no ready alternative to Explorer at the time of the settlement.
      - twblalock 6y ago
        Netscape Navigator and Communicator, Mozilla (the original one), and Opera all existed at the time and were trivially easy to obtain.
        6y ago

mthoms 6y ago

Good points. I think the thing that irks people is Apple's bullying. They just don't seem to be operating in good faith. For instance, from the report, here are Apple's "Anti-circumvention Policies": >2. “Multiplatform Services: Apps that operate across multiple platforms may allow users to access content, subscriptions, or features they have acquired in your app on other platforms or your web site,... provided those items are also available as in-app purchases within the app. You must not directly or indirectly target iOS users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase, and your general communications about other purchasing methods must not discourage use of in-app purchase.” Apple is dictating what I can tell my customers in "general communications" where Apple is not involved. That's not a free market, it's abusive. If a customer comes to my site from a search I should be able to say "Here are the purchase options. Please note that Apple takes 30% if you purchase through their store. If you purchase direct, our processing fees are only %2.5". In that statement, I'm not making any judgement call on whether Apple is good or bad. I'm simply stating a verifiable fact. If the value proposition of Apple's store has benefits to the consumer then its merits should stand on their own. For the record, I believe the App store offers many solid benefits to consumers. I'm just saying we should let the consumer decide if the benefits of the App store outweigh their other chosen criteria. TL;DR Apple has no business inserting itself in my customer communications on my own website so long as I only state facts. Edit: This is from the perspective of say, an eBook author or MacOS developer. I realize that iOS apps can only be purchased through Apple so the point there is moot.

Despegar 6y ago
>Apple is dictating what I can tell my customers in "general communications" where Apple is not involved. That's not a free market, it's abusive. If a customer comes to my site from a search I should be able to say "Here are the purchase options. Please note that Apple takes 30% if you purchase through their store. If you purchase direct, our processing fees are only %2.5". Everyone that argues against the rule that says you can't advertise in your apps ways to bypass the App Store for payment are basically arguing that they should be able to free ride on the platform, something discussed in this study. >In addition, for their business model to be successful, digital marketplaces often have to rely on rules that prevent customers from free riding on their services. Free riding involves buyers and/or sellers avoiding fees after the platform has helped connect them, which means that the platform is not compensated for the successful match and the use of the platform’s technology, tools, and services to facilitate and promote valuable transactions between buyers and sellers. A review of the policies and rules of large app stores and online marketplaces that distribute physical goods and services — marketplaces for which the risk for free riding is particularly high — shows that digital marketplaces routinely forbid behaviors aimed at avoiding fees. >In addition to the commission on paid apps and in-app purchases of digital content, services, and subscriptions, Apple imposes guidelines that govern the use of the App Store. Among those policies are rules about in-app purchases to prevent users and developers from free riding on Apple’s App Store services and investments. Apps cannot explicitly steer app users away from in-app purchases — for example, by providing external links that bypass the App Store.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> And advocating that any platform provider is a monopoly restricting free exercise of selling goods. It's not any platform, it's a platform which actually has a monopoly. Amazon is a "platform" for selling boxed software but they haven't got a monopoly on it. You might make a few extra sales from being on Amazon than not, but even most of the sales you make through Amazon would only be diverted to Walmart or Best Buy or your own website if your software wasn't for sale on Amazon. If they insisted on paying you 30% less than competitors, you would make more by refusing them and then losing 10% of those sales while 90% of them get diverted to other distributors who take smaller cuts. Which in turn prevents them from doing that, because getting the normal distribution margin in a competitive market is better for Amazon than getting nothing. That isn't true for Apple because there is no diverting those sales to a different distributor because there is no other distributor. You can sell a Windows app to the same customer with a Windows device through any number of distributors, but nobody but Apple distributes apps to iOS devices.

supernova87a 6y ago
It will turn quite heavily on what is the market in which you assert a monopoly exists. There certainly are alternatives to someone developing mobile apps -- Android, others. The more narrowly you define it, of course you can make anything seem like a monopoly. Whether that narrow market is truly what is in dispute, is the question. But you should listen to Thiel's talk on this -- is a restaurant that is the only British food outlet on Main Street, Springfield a monopoly over the British restaurant industry on Main Street?
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > is a restaurant that is the only British food outlet on Main Street, Springfield a monopoly over the British restaurant industry on Main Street? Which brings you to the question of substitution. If the only British food outlet on Main Street, Springfield raises prices by just a modest amount, does that cause a significant number of customers to take their business elsewhere? If so, they haven't got a monopoly and the "elsewhere" is part of the same market, which in that case would presumably include restaurants serving different types of food or which are still in the same general vicinity. So what's the substitute for the App Store? If they raised prices, could developers switch to Google Play instead? Well, no. Developers need both at once because they each reach different customers. If Apple charged too much a developer might abandon the iOS market entirely and use only Google Play instead of using both, but none of that business from the App Store could get moved to Google Play because those customers don't have Android devices and Google Play doesn't distribute iOS apps. They would just have to lose all of that business, not substitute Google Play for the App Store by moving the customers over there. Compare this to where you stop selling your boxed software to Amazon but continue selling it to Walmart and Best Buy. Most of the people who would have bought your software on Amazon still want it, so they just buy it from some other place. The same customers. Your iOS customers can't do that because nobody else distributes apps for their devices. Also notice that they did this on purpose. Suppose the owner of the only "British food outlet on Main Street, Springfield" is also a landlord who owns 20% of the land in the city. They don't have a monopoly on land, but then what they do is build a wall around the portion of the city they own, so that it's a two hour drive around the wall to get out of their domain. Then the competing restaurants that had been "one street over" are on the other side of the wall, which puts them in a different market (can't substitute them anymore), so now they've got a restaurant monopoly.

saurik 6y ago

To me a core problem is that the market is segmented into a handful of oligopolies. People sometimes say "can't you sell your software elsewhere", and while I can sell a chair at another store, if somehow chairs had to be compatible with tables and somehow there were only like two or three kinds of table in the world and all of them had this weird chair restriction and it was all based on weird artificial interoperability barriers... I just don't think the people who thought through these laws--even the DMCA (which is all about this stuff and wants it... but only so far! it has explicit exclusions based on principled stances taken by congress that are now obsolete) and even the people at the EFF who try to fight it (based on my work with them and extensive discussions with some of their people on our shared projects)--considered what asymmetric encryption and tamper proof module digital rights management technology does to competition (where the case law and legislative intent had always been that these kinds of restrictions should not have much merit: see Sega v. Accolade as a landmark case, wherein Sega hadn't no right to try to lock Accolade off their platform _and everyone liked that and consisted their lack of such right to be important for competition_ and yet now you can build that lock out of encryption and no amount of reverse engineering is guaranteed to break it and all of the assumptions that "software interoperability" is even possible have been destroyed).