Isn't it actually about market power? Apple controls a dominant share of the market for paid apps on phones, so it can use that power to extract more money fro

Isn't it actually about market power? Apple controls a dominant share of the market for paid apps on phones, so it can use that power to extract more money from sellers of such apps. Google's market share is very small, so it can't impose this fee on sellers. When you say, Apple treats their users as pawns, well, Google's ad business which generates most of their money, also treats their users as pawns. Both companies are amazingly effective at extracting extremely high profit margins from the business that they control. In other words, primary goal of both companies is to extract as much money as possible from consumers and they're both extremely good at that, in their own way. Neither treats users as pawns, because, that would undermine their market position. Both are user-centric in the sense that they offer products that consumers (whether end-users or ad buyers) believe to be useful enough that they pay very high prices for them. And both companies are zealous in maintaining that relationship. Apple seems to be slightly better at this, sitting on about $200 billion, but that's only after using hundreds of billions of dollars to buy back their own stock over the years. This treasury stock is hard to value, because it's unlikely Apple would actually sell it, except to buy some other big company. But it looks to me like Apple has enough treasury stock that it could be converted into something like a trillion dollars if they wanted to do that and were legally permitted to. (As an accounting matter, however, treasury stock isn't even counted as an asset, even though the company paid very real cash for at least part of it.) Google's also sitting on well over $100 billion and a bunch of treasury stock. It raises some interesting social issues, but there's nothing very different about the way these two companies relate to their users, or indeed to society generally.