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I could see a law like that having unintended consequences for less monolithic players. Sure, for the app store it would result in a disclaimer saying "30% of

I could see a law like that having unintended consequences for less monolithic players. Sure, for the app store it would result in a disclaimer saying "30% of your fee goes to apple", but for some indie developer selling software on their website it could be "3% goes to paypal, 4% goes to shopify, 2% goes to adnetwork..." and then you've just got an information overload that nobody pays attention to. I think a better solution would be to make these sorts of restrictions on disclosure illegal. IIRC Visa and Mastercard also have clauses in their merchant agreements forbidding you from telling people how much their fees are. If you want to tell your customers exactly how much you're paying the app store, or your payment processor, or any other cost that's part of the final payment, you should be allowed to do that. If you would prefer your customers just see one simple price, you should be able to do that too.

asciident 6y ago
This would not be information overload at all. It would be fantastic. I want to know if part of my payment is directed to middlemen, so I could seek ways to pay the author/developer/artist more directly. Airlines have to do this and I have never heard anyone (except the airlines) say that they were bothered by the writing out of taxes and fees explicitly. Utility companies do this (including cell phone companies), and I have never heard anyone saying that those lines of text were problematic. So I'd be very wary of preemptively trying to stop an idea like this, because of a potential unintended consequence which is itself not a big deal (and has not surfaced in similar situations).
mwarkentin 6y ago
Or just set it up to apply only to businesses doing > xx million in revenue per year.
jkaplowitz 6y ago
That's a case where the developer of the app is selling through their own storefront, not being forced to use a specific middleman with a specific (and large) cut in order to reach the users. Relative to the Apple/iOS situation, that feels qualitatively different. Apple's restrictions are even tighter than those of Visa and MasterCard, some of which have anyway been overridden by laws and/or court settlements. As just the simplest example, Visa and MasterCard have never in my lifetime forbidden offering and advertising cash discounts (even when they've forbidden credit card surcharges). Developers for iOS have no way to sell iOS apps cheaper than through the method facilitated by Apple (which would allow them to increase the app store price to compensate for the 30% fee), nor can they mention to their iOS customers alternative cheaper ways of purchasing content. Nothing in the previous paragraph has an equivalent in the indie developer world.

asciident 6y ago

This would not be information overload at all. It would be fantastic. I want to know if part of my payment is directed to middlemen, so I could seek ways to pay the author/developer/artist more directly. Airlines have to do this and I have never heard anyone (except the airlines) say that they were bothered by the writing out of taxes and fees explicitly. Utility companies do this (including cell phone companies), and I have never heard anyone saying that those lines of text were problematic. So I'd be very wary of preemptively trying to stop an idea like this, because of a potential unintended consequence which is itself not a big deal (and has not surfaced in similar situations).

mwarkentin 6y ago

Or just set it up to apply only to businesses doing > xx million in revenue per year.

jkaplowitz 6y ago

That's a case where the developer of the app is selling through their own storefront, not being forced to use a specific middleman with a specific (and large) cut in order to reach the users. Relative to the Apple/iOS situation, that feels qualitatively different. Apple's restrictions are even tighter than those of Visa and MasterCard, some of which have anyway been overridden by laws and/or court settlements. As just the simplest example, Visa and MasterCard have never in my lifetime forbidden offering and advertising cash discounts (even when they've forbidden credit card surcharges). Developers for iOS have no way to sell iOS apps cheaper than through the method facilitated by Apple (which would allow them to increase the app store price to compensate for the 30% fee), nor can they mention to their iOS customers alternative cheaper ways of purchasing content. Nothing in the previous paragraph has an equivalent in the indie developer world.