3 ms·

At least you are calling Apple's behavior what it is: rent-seeking.

vr46 6y ago
Well, kind of... Conventionally, rent-seeking is a poor quality activity which doesn’t generate any new wealth, it just transfers it. But that’s not the case here, at least from my perspective, as Apple invests huge amounts in developing their hardware and software and millions of developers around the world (ok, maybe thousands, I don’t know) and their families have benefited from this. It’s not like they’ve inherited a vast real-estate portfolio that was amassed through violence and war (see British aristocracy, est. 1066) and have invested relatively little into it.
- asimpletune 6y ago
  I’m not sure why this is being downvoted. A huge consideration into whether Apple is truly anti-competitive should be if this has caused harm to consumers.
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    How is harm measured, exactly? I feel harmed when a company makes huge margins on me from something.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > I’m not sure why this is being downvoted. A huge consideration into whether Apple is truly anti-competitive should be if this has caused harm to consumers. Prior to the 1980s, monopolies were considered bad (or at least extremely dangerous and suspicious) by default, and leveraging one to privilege your entry into another market was a huge no-no (though I'm not sure leveraging a monopoly to create a monopolized adjacent market would always have been seen the same way). Robert Bork's theory of "consumer harm" as the guiding light of anti-trust enforcement (and further conceiving of "harm" mostly in the form of higher prices, or at least "value for money") has given corporations too much wiggle room and consequently led to a lot of contorted legal and economic arguments, substantially reducing antitrust scrutiny and enforcement (which was the whole point, AFAICT).
- projektfu 6y ago
  It kind of is like rent seeking though. Apple has developed a product with some software but not the software we call Fortnite. They are now acting similar to a company like ExpressScripts, who created an organization in the form of a platform so they could extract rents from both the drug makers and the (insurance company) buyers. If Epic keeps the game off iPhone, there’s some overall loss to consumers. If they keep prices the same but pay the Apple fees, they pay rent to Apple. If they raise prices across the board to compensate, consumers pay rent to Apple and there is some deadweight loss because of a likely reduction in demand.

vr46 6y ago

Well, kind of... Conventionally, rent-seeking is a poor quality activity which doesn’t generate any new wealth, it just transfers it. But that’s not the case here, at least from my perspective, as Apple invests huge amounts in developing their hardware and software and millions of developers around the world (ok, maybe thousands, I don’t know) and their families have benefited from this. It’s not like they’ve inherited a vast real-estate portfolio that was amassed through violence and war (see British aristocracy, est. 1066) and have invested relatively little into it.

asimpletune 6y ago
I’m not sure why this is being downvoted. A huge consideration into whether Apple is truly anti-competitive should be if this has caused harm to consumers.
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  How is harm measured, exactly? I feel harmed when a company makes huge margins on me from something.
- webmaven 6y ago
  > I’m not sure why this is being downvoted. A huge consideration into whether Apple is truly anti-competitive should be if this has caused harm to consumers. Prior to the 1980s, monopolies were considered bad (or at least extremely dangerous and suspicious) by default, and leveraging one to privilege your entry into another market was a huge no-no (though I'm not sure leveraging a monopoly to create a monopolized adjacent market would always have been seen the same way). Robert Bork's theory of "consumer harm" as the guiding light of anti-trust enforcement (and further conceiving of "harm" mostly in the form of higher prices, or at least "value for money") has given corporations too much wiggle room and consequently led to a lot of contorted legal and economic arguments, substantially reducing antitrust scrutiny and enforcement (which was the whole point, AFAICT).
projektfu 6y ago
It kind of is like rent seeking though. Apple has developed a product with some software but not the software we call Fortnite. They are now acting similar to a company like ExpressScripts, who created an organization in the form of a platform so they could extract rents from both the drug makers and the (insurance company) buyers. If Epic keeps the game off iPhone, there’s some overall loss to consumers. If they keep prices the same but pay the Apple fees, they pay rent to Apple. If they raise prices across the board to compensate, consumers pay rent to Apple and there is some deadweight loss because of a likely reduction in demand.