12 ms·

Call me a corporatist, but I don't even think Google and Apple should have to justify their 30% pricing at all as "reasonable". They could charge anything they

Call me a corporatist, but I don't even think Google and Apple should have to justify their 30% pricing at all as "reasonable". They could charge anything they like -- 100%. It's a voluntary contract, and Epic doesn't have to engage in it. We don't have to engage in it. There's no fundamental right to offer an app on an app store, and if the scope of the market is defined as the market for video games/content, then none of these places are monopolies and companies/people are free to set their desired prices. Who is the court, or any of us, to say what should be the charge for selling a game on a marketplace? That's like someone telling you what your profit margin should be for a product that everyone wants. Why should it be tied to your costs? I mean, in many cases it is, due to customer demand reasons, but there are tons of things that you pay for that have prices nothing close to what it costs to provide. That's why I think it will fail in court at least (maybe not the SEC, or Congress). The argument that 30% is unfair goes nowhere in court -- so what should it be? Courts are not the forum for that question. Anyway, I finish with snark: if Epic invoked its same logic on itself, clearly it should reduce its profit / subscription charges to a "reasonable" level. Epic is the only one I'm able to buy Epic games from -- clearly they're a monopoly and need to have their market-abusive behavior and extortionate pricing regulated? Right? I find irony in many people who get probably so knee-jerk opposed to Google/Apple and "on Epic's side" will find themselves justifying why they should be free to set their own prices when they launch their next product.

Barrin92 6y ago
Call me a democrat but I think the United States of America shouldn't have to justify its laws at all and should regulate Google's and Apple's store however they want, tax them 100% instead of 20%, after all they voluntarily made a business, they can move their HQ to Swaziland, who is to tell the American people how to regulate their businesses It's not like Apple and Google can't move, there's like 200 countries, that's like a hundred times more countries than app stores
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > the United States of America shouldn't have to justify its laws at all We don’t have laws that Apple is breaking. Almost all legal analysts agree Epic’s case is a long shot designed to attract legislative intervention.
  - ves 6y ago
    We could make some (but we won’t), and this justification would hold up just fine in that case; whether or not the laws actually exist is immaterial.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > We could make some (but we won’t), and this justification would hold up just fine in that case Not really. Court cases are all about justifying why an action or inaction meets or fails a law. Legislation is all about justifying why a cause requires legislative action. Exercising freedoms, for a person or group of people pursuing common enterprise, does not need to be justified. The moment it does, it’s not a right. And choosing how to price an unregulated inessential good outside emergency conditions is not activity Americans have to justify to their government.
      - 6510 6y ago
        I dunno. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Tax_Freedom_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Tax_Freedom_Act Reads like a joke now?
      - username90 6y ago
        > And choosing how to price an unregulated inessential good outside emergency conditions is not activity Americans have to justify to their government. No, choosing how to price things is needed for modern capitalism to work which is why we have antitrust laws. The question you should ask yourself is "if the 30% tax is many times higher than what it costs Apple to deliver the service, what forces would cause Apple to reduce said tax?", if you can't come up with an answer then we need antitrust action here.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  The government of the USA is completely free to do that if the representatives agree, and let them live with the effects and consequences of their choices. And the demand for companies to operate in their country if they do. US corporate tax rates have been adjusted many times, and have been (until recently) among the highest in the world, but the benefits are worth it. Your sarcasm about the flight of capital and corporations is maybe more right than you realize. Sadly, maybe also the part about not having to justify its laws at all...
- DuskStar 6y ago
  Unironically, I would be happy with a sliding tax scale here - if Apple/Google takes x% of the purchase price, then there's an x% federal tax added on top of the purchase price.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    Sales tax is taken care of by Apple from their 30% cut - ie. the 70% they give to the company is only taxable income and the company doesn't need to do anything or pay any extra to comply with national or local sales taxes [anywhere in the world].
- jariel 6y ago
  "United States of America shouldn't have to justify its laws" Oh, absolutely 100% positively 'not true' - the US 100% has to 'justify it's laws'. While 'something should be done here' I don't think prices need to be regulated, rather, just opening up fair market conditions in different layers of the value chain. Just making 3rd party apps and app-stores available on each platform would suffice.
  - svnpenn 6y ago
    Whoosh
- simula67 6y ago
  I think they are most likely to move to Ireland or the Carribean and not Swaziland 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shifting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shif... 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprechaun_economics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprechaun_economics 3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
  - dgellow 6y ago
    They are already in Ireland :)
b20000 6y ago
there is an imbalance of power here...
mulmen 6y ago
Are you aware that Boeing is not allowed to operate an airline while also manufacturing commercial airliners? Do you think this is reasonable? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_...
- smabie 6y ago
  I think Boeing should be free to jump into the airline business. But even if they could they never would actually go for it. The exposure and risk is simply too high.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    You realize Boeing was in the airline business and was specifically forced to break up because it was anticompetitive? > After the Air Mail scandal of 1934, the U.S. government concluded that such large holding companies as United Aircraft and Transport were anti-competitive, and new antitrust laws were passed forbidding airframe or engine manufacturers from having interests in airlines.
    - smabie 6y ago
      Yes, I am aware, but there's no reason why Boeing would be interested in the airline business today.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - nwienert 6y ago
        Because there’s more than 2 airlines competing so the margins are low.
      - mulmen 6y ago
        Because they were broken up to create a competitive marketplace which would not otherwise have existed. Also if Boeing were allowed to create an airline they could, say, not sell airliners to any other airline, or charge them much more. Or just pass on the airliner sales margins to consumers as lower fares... until the other airlines went out of business. But I guess the airlines could just make their own airplanes right?
BobbyJo 6y ago
I agree, but they should both be charged with colluding on pricing (neither can justify the prices and it's obvious no market price discovery ever happened.
- nodamage 6y ago
  Steam set a 30% rate years before the App Store or Play Store even existed, and the same rate is used across the industry in both console stores and physical stores. Accusing Apple and Google of colluding on pricing requires an enormous misunderstanding of what collusion actually means.
  - supernova87a 6y ago
    I think the person is confused about prices settling at the same level with collusion. And the history as you point out. By their logic, all the supermarkets in my neighborhood are colluding on the price of tomatoes.
  - pas 6y ago
    But installing software on Windows is not a problem. You can put your game in the Windows app store. There are multiple (gaming) "app store" things on Windows. Steam has a 30% cut because it's so big that the smaller stores don't move the needle much. So there's no real market force pushing prices down, because the other offerings are just not substitutes. (Eg. there's GOG Galaxy, the other ones are too tied to certain publishers.)
nmfisher 6y ago
While I broadly agree with your sentiments, Epic's issue here isn't the percentage commission per se. It's the fact that both Stores do not allow apps that circumvent Apple/Google's payment systems for in-app purchases (and in Apple's case, the fact that side-loading is prohibited, forcing you to use the App Store for any software you want to run on portable Apple devices). If you took a favourable interpretation, a 30% commission only becomes anti-competitive once Apple/Google take away any alternative. That being said, I don't agree with that and I'm still not clear what the legal basis for that argument is. I'm leaning towards Epic losing this one mightily.
- judge2020 6y ago
  One of their points in court was attacking the 30% since they do, indeed, love the traffic the App Store brings them (since not all players found Fortnite via EpicGames.com). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669192
  - nmfisher 6y ago
    Of course they're going to attack the 30% as too high. Obviously, their best outcome is reducing that percentage to zero. But to get there, their argument obviously can't be "Apple is a monopoly allows it to extract 30%, which is too high, so we want it reduced to zero". That's not going to work. Rather, they get it to zero by saying "Apple is a monopoly and prevents competition by banning apps that implement their own payment processing system, so leave the 30% as-is but let any app implement its own payments". So the actual percentage, and the restriction against accepting payments outside Apple IAP, are two slightly different concerns. Reducing the percentage to 20% would obviously be a net financial win, but it's definitely not their main objective.
shirakawasuna 6y ago
Simply start your own major smartphone platform to compete with the duopoly, duh. Easy as that.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  Maybe it tells you something about the market dynamics and difficulty of technology that there are only 2. And maybe that produces the margins it does. If it's not easy, maybe you should think about why then. And not be so quick to dictate how things should be otherwise.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    To add on, only two remaining. Multiple massive corporations with essentially unlimited funding and desire failed in this space repeatedly, some with enormous head starts. The thought that someone can simply start another mobile platform is naive bordering on absurd. This is an established market that clearly can support only one or two participants. We have seen this movie.
    - josefx 6y ago
      > This is an established market that clearly can support only one or two participants. It helps that the Google Play license would kill the existing product lines of any of the large phone manufacturers that tried. As far as I am aware courts seem to generally agree that Googles license is hilariously anti competitive in nature.
      - mulmen 6y ago
        I should have appended "in the current regulatory climate."
  - jariel 6y ago
    " maybe you should think about why then" It's 'not easy' because the current monopolists will crush any attempt to take their turf - which is the whole point.
quotemstr 6y ago
"If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use is the rule?" Do we really want to live in a world in which a few tech companies get to shave 30% off of all the value produced by a significant portion of the entire economy? Why should we put up with that? Because we made a rule a long ago that in general companies can decide their own pricing structure and device policy? Is a slavish adherence to this rule worth making us all 30% poorer? Why? We can and should make an exceptionion to the general principle of corporate independence whenever we find ourselves in a situation in which a key piece of public infrastructure happens to be privately owned --- and app stores have definitely become public infrastructure). We shouldn't let a blind adherence to an abstraction prevent us from ensuring that this public infrastructure is run in the public interest.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  You need to carefully watch for yourself falling down the trap of growing the definition of what is an entitlement and what is not. An app store that sells games and voluntary entertainments is not a public infrastructure, operated in the public interest. That's almost laughable. And don't be so quick to conclude that now because you reap the benefits of a system that was previously set up, you can simply decide that you think the % is too high and take it back "in the public interest". Go ahead, propose that every company only be allowed a 5% markup on its costs. Let's see where that takes us.
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    Don't you think it's at least plausible that app stores are natural monopolies like electrical service? And mobile devices really are a key part of almost everyone's life these days: why wouldn't the nearly-exclusive channel for software distribution to these devices be infrastructure important to the public? When you have a natural monopoly operating key public infrastructure, regulation is a clear and justifiable option.
    - supernova87a 6y ago
      You are confusing the concepts of a monopoly and a public utility.
strider3g 6y ago
ISP should also take a cut, I mean why not..they can... then the electric company can charge all of us a % ... why don’t camera companies get a cut of movie revenues... why don’t tv companies charge cable companies to work with one another, I mean... let’s just go for it
- supernova87a 6y ago
  They do.
  - nrmitchi 6y ago
    They do not. What I pay an ISP is a monthly fee for them providing a service. I paid Apple/Google/manufacturer a fee when I purchased a device. My ISP does not receive more/less in fees each month based on how much online shopping I do.
- 0xfffafaCrash 6y ago
  ISPs charge onerous prices already and they often have local monopolies enforced by local governments and public utilities (which create artificially high regulatory barriers to entry to eliminate competition [0]) as opposed to dominant market positions in a virtual space as a result of network effects and consumer choice. The government and regulatory bodies are so thoroughly captured that the government has actually made it illegal for municipalities to provide broadband across much of the U.S. [1]. The situation is similar, and in some cases worse, for power companies which are often granted local monopolies, immune from antitrust laws through their relations with local government, and guaranteed insane profits despite awful performance [2]. Using ISPs and power companies as an example for why more government intervention in more open virtual markets would be advisable is probably not a winning argument. [0] https://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-just-cable-companies-and-blame-local-government-for-dismal-broadband-competition/ https://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-ju... [1] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc... [2] https://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9287719/utilities-monopoly https://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9287719/utilities-monopoly
jariel 6y ago
" They could charge anything they like -- 100%. It's a voluntary contract, and Epic doesn't have to engage in it. We don't have to engage in it. There's no fundamental right to offer an app on an app store, and if the scope of the market is defined as the market for video games/content, then none of these places are monopolies and companies/people are free to set their desired prices." They are monopolies, or more precisely, an oligarchy. Mobile devices have become 'essential utility' not quite but almost like roads, internet access etc. and Google/Apple have absolute control. Imagine if Verizon and AT&T said: "We're going to charge 30% of all revenue derived form Internet Usage". What would be the difference? Could we just 'refuse to engage' and 'not use the internet'? We scream 'net neutrality' when it comes to network access, we need to recognize some of the same logic applies here as well. Sometimes it's hard to demonstrate 'consumer harm' when we don't know what the market would look like otherwise: in Canada, literally up until the 1980's, the telephone system was a de-facto government monopoly called 'Bell Telephone'. You had to buy everything from them, they set prices etc. etc.. Imagine what would happen if iOS and Android 'banned' anything other than Safari and Chrome. Imagine if theY forced Bing and Google only respectively as search engines and banned all others? How would we react? In much the same way Europe has required users have the ability to have the choice of Search, even default search, I think the minimum requirement would be to allow 3rd party apps and 3rd party app stores.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  > Imagine if Verizon and AT&T said: "We're going to charge 30% of all revenue derived form Internet Usage". Well, mobile operators used to charge up to 80% on their Symbian, J2ME, Windows CE/PocketPC, Blackberry, Brew stores.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mattigames 6y ago
That's strawman, Epic's fortnite is not one of the only 2 surviving videogames in the world, while Android and Apple are the only 2 mobile platforms; if Fornite was somehow one of the only 10 mobile games people had available at all I would agree but not in the current state of affairs.
weavejester 6y ago
"Who is the court, or any of us, to say what should* be the charge for selling a game on a marketplace?"* That falls under competition law. It's in a government's interests to encourage companies to compete with each other, and to prevent a single or a handful of companies explicitly or implicitly agreeing to control market pricing to the detriment of consumers. In this case, both Google and Apple set the same 30% pricing, and clearly neither have any incentive to rock the boat and compete with each other, and every incentive to dissuade or prevent other companies from creating competing app stores. When competition in a market fails, it's up to the courts or government to step in. "I find irony in many people who get probably so knee-jerk opposed to Google/Apple and "on Epic's side" will find themselves justifying why they should be free to set their own prices when they launch their next product." Its not hypocritical (or even ironic) to say that there should be different rules for companies operating as part of an oligopoly, compared to small business competing in a crowded marketplace.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  The state-overseen apparatus you might next jump to is a nightmare to me. You would be ok with different tax rates for different size corporations? A committee / agency to decide what is or is not an oligopoly? So, someone coming up with a new app that does something never done before, that would be a monopoly or oligopoly, right?
  - stale2002 6y ago
    > A committee / agency to decide what is or is not an oligopoly? This is called our court system. And they have been handling anti-trust law for a century now. And they have done a pretty reasonable job of it. Anti-trust law is not something new. It is well established.
    - supernova87a 6y ago
      You are not calling for violations of a law to be tried between adversaries at court as an exception to normal business behavior. You are calling for the wholesale new regulation of business by the status and concentration of its market. A highly subjective and scope-dependent analysis specific to every company, every market, every industry. You should realize the difference. You think that's what the courts are supposed to do? You have a serious flaw in understanding what courts are for if so.
echelon 6y ago
Google and Apple have gotten too big. They're harming our industry. It's time to break them up. Besides, our devices are computers. The next evolution of laptops for most people. We should be able to run whatever software we want on them. Google and Apple purposefully acted like mafia to keep them as locked down as they could, while they both benefited from the web and open source to rise to and ultimately cement their position. Fuck them both.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  >Google and Apple have gotten too big. They're harming our industry. It's time to break them up. Besides, our devices are computers. The next evolution of laptops for most people. We should be able to run whatever software we want on them. Google and Apple purposefully acted like mafia to keep them as locked down as they could, while they both benefited from the web and open source to rise to and ultimately cement their position. Fuck them both. Now this is the kind of well-informed intelligent debate we need more of around here.
  - echelon 6y ago
    > Now this is the kind of well-informed intelligent debate we need more of around here. You're being rude. I'm tired of companies profiting off open source while simultaneously closing down access to mainstream computing technology, harming the open web, imposing taxes, and limiting access. Tech was better in the 90's to early 2010s, before these companies got a stranglehold and executed Microsoft's failed vision of embrace, extend, extinguish on the internet. You shouldn't be able to sell a generic computer and control the only marketplace with which to get software onto it. Not in this country. It's a regression. These aren't silly, cheap gaming consoles where teenagers often have more than one. For many people, their phone represents their only access to the internet. It's how they conduct their life - banking/payments, job search, dating, contacting friends and loved ones, photos, and an endless myriad of other functions. A company shouldn't own that entire stack. You and I aren't going to agree, and that's fine. I'm writing my legislators. You write yours. The solutions I'm proposing to Lucy McBath are: 1. Requiring that phone operating systems allow installs from the web and/or USB. Companies are free to maintain their marketplace and charge whatever they want. 2. In the extreme case, break the companies up into hardware and software services. This is more relevant to Google, which has a dangerous control over advertising, search, and the browser. Their browser needs to be taken away, along with AMP and their interest in web standards.
Qwertious 6y ago
>Who is the court, or any of us, to say what should be the charge for selling a game on a marketplace? This comes down to what I call competitive capitalism VS Hobson's Choice capitalism. Android doesn't really have any competitors - Amazon, Samsung, they have zero legal access to the apps on the Google Play store unless they go through Android. As such, if they refuse to allow competitors to force them to compete, they have a responsibility to compete despite the lack of competition and if they refuse to do that it's the government's job to beat them until they comply. Again: the problem here isn't "freedom", it's competition. Your next product probably doesn't have a major captive sub-market. But let's address the " freedom" argument: what I call Hobson's Choice capitalism. "If you don't like it, you're free to rewrite the OS from scratch, then convince every single app on the app store to switch over while starting with no hardware support and no app support. This is a Hobson's Choice - it's not about making an improvement on Android, it's about making a unilateral improvement on the entire universe just to push Android forward. It's absurd and not a real choice. But more importantly, if you consider Hobson's Choice capitalism to be capitalism, then technically the government is equivalent to a private corporation as long as you can forfeit your citizenship and move to Somalia to be free of your country's obligations on you. This basically contradicts the standard definition of the free market, but that's the point - everyone rejects the Hobson's choice out of hand, because it's just so absurdly irrelevant to competition. So let's talk about competition: would Google rather take a lower cut, or legally permit Amazon and Tizen to access Google Play apps from their non-Android OSes? Because right now, they're not competing. They're just sitting on their chicken-egg problem based laurels. As for Epic: I sort of agree with your pejorative - copyright is intended to provide funding, but the right it actually grants is the right to deny a copy. Some companies simply sit on copyright they never actually intend to monetize, and others keep hold of it far longer than they need to make a healthy profit proportionate to its success. The notion that all copyright needs the exact sake period is also absurd, as some industries are much more fast-moving than others. I think we need to take a long, hard look at copyright monopolies, starting with the absurd "lifetime plus 70 years" duration.
happymellon 6y ago
Epic have bought up games and moved them to their store which, as a Windows only platform, has reduced choice. They should totally get regulated as well since they are reducing competition. If it wasn't run by a complete and utter dickhead I may have more sympathy.
- Reelin 6y ago
  The Epic Games Store officially supports both Windows and macOS. It runs on Linux via Lutris, and they even paid them a grant for that purpose. (Of course I'd prefer official Linux support. It seems odd to support Android but not Linux.) Is there some particular reason you don't like Tim Sweeney beyond his failure to be a diehard Linux crusader?
  - happymellon 6y ago
    He has taken games that supported Linux and dropped that support because he is a jerk. You don't have to be a "diehard Linux crusader" to see that dropping support from a platform because your store doesn't support it is a shitty move. Running the Windows version of Linux software via Wine isn't support.
riantogo 6y ago
You are not wrong. But your world view is a bit too simplistic. Real world is a messy place. Hence consumer protection is a thing.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
stale2002 6y ago
Alright, now lets say microsoft did the exact same behavior, on every single PC. And made it impossible for you to install unapproved apps that did not give them a cut. Would you really believe that such behavior would not break anti-trust law? Because the courts already ruled against microsoft in a much less extreme situation. And furthermore, are you really OK with that behavior, if microsoft forced every single windows PC in the world, to disallow unapproved apps? > The argument that 30% is unfair goes nowhere in court -- so what should it be? The lawsuit has nothing to do with the 30% cut. Instead it has to do with Google and Apple engaging in anti-competitive behavior, and using their significant market power to prevent competition. They should not be forced to change their price. Instead, they should be force to stop their anti-competitive behavior, and allow other apps to be installed, in an easier way (in Apple's case), where as Google should be stopped from forcing OEM providers to not preload the epic app store. > why they should be free to set their own prices It has nothing to do with price setting. That is nowhere in the lawsuit. Instead, Epic is trying to stop anti-competitive behavior.
hajile 6y ago
You are wrong because it's not a free market. Get rid of the patents and hundred-year copyright monopoly grants then we'll talk. If a monopoly is created and enforced by the state, it is their duty to regulate it.
hhjinks 6y ago
> Epic doesn't have to engage in it. We don't have to engage in it They do if they want to be on the mobile market, as evident by them being kicked off 98% of the mobile market when they decided to not engage in it.

Barrin92 6y ago

Call me a democrat but I think the United States of America shouldn't have to justify its laws at all and should regulate Google's and Apple's store however they want, tax them 100% instead of 20%, after all they voluntarily made a business, they can move their HQ to Swaziland, who is to tell the American people how to regulate their businesses It's not like Apple and Google can't move, there's like 200 countries, that's like a hundred times more countries than app stores

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> the United States of America shouldn't have to justify its laws at all We don’t have laws that Apple is breaking. Almost all legal analysts agree Epic’s case is a long shot designed to attract legislative intervention.
- ves 6y ago
  We could make some (but we won’t), and this justification would hold up just fine in that case; whether or not the laws actually exist is immaterial.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > We could make some (but we won’t), and this justification would hold up just fine in that case Not really. Court cases are all about justifying why an action or inaction meets or fails a law. Legislation is all about justifying why a cause requires legislative action. Exercising freedoms, for a person or group of people pursuing common enterprise, does not need to be justified. The moment it does, it’s not a right. And choosing how to price an unregulated inessential good outside emergency conditions is not activity Americans have to justify to their government.
    - 6510 6y ago
      I dunno. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Tax_Freedom_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Tax_Freedom_Act Reads like a joke now?
    - username90 6y ago
      > And choosing how to price an unregulated inessential good outside emergency conditions is not activity Americans have to justify to their government. No, choosing how to price things is needed for modern capitalism to work which is why we have antitrust laws. The question you should ask yourself is "if the 30% tax is many times higher than what it costs Apple to deliver the service, what forces would cause Apple to reduce said tax?", if you can't come up with an answer then we need antitrust action here.
supernova87a 6y ago
The government of the USA is completely free to do that if the representatives agree, and let them live with the effects and consequences of their choices. And the demand for companies to operate in their country if they do. US corporate tax rates have been adjusted many times, and have been (until recently) among the highest in the world, but the benefits are worth it. Your sarcasm about the flight of capital and corporations is maybe more right than you realize. Sadly, maybe also the part about not having to justify its laws at all...
DuskStar 6y ago
Unironically, I would be happy with a sliding tax scale here - if Apple/Google takes x% of the purchase price, then there's an x% federal tax added on top of the purchase price.
- judge2020 6y ago
  Sales tax is taken care of by Apple from their 30% cut - ie. the 70% they give to the company is only taxable income and the company doesn't need to do anything or pay any extra to comply with national or local sales taxes [anywhere in the world].
jariel 6y ago
"United States of America shouldn't have to justify its laws" Oh, absolutely 100% positively 'not true' - the US 100% has to 'justify it's laws'. While 'something should be done here' I don't think prices need to be regulated, rather, just opening up fair market conditions in different layers of the value chain. Just making 3rd party apps and app-stores available on each platform would suffice.
- svnpenn 6y ago
  Whoosh
simula67 6y ago
I think they are most likely to move to Ireland or the Carribean and not Swaziland 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shifting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shif... 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprechaun_economics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprechaun_economics 3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
- dgellow 6y ago
  They are already in Ireland :)

b20000 6y ago

there is an imbalance of power here...

mulmen 6y ago

Are you aware that Boeing is not allowed to operate an airline while also manufacturing commercial airliners? Do you think this is reasonable? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_...

smabie 6y ago
I think Boeing should be free to jump into the airline business. But even if they could they never would actually go for it. The exposure and risk is simply too high.
- mulmen 6y ago
  You realize Boeing was in the airline business and was specifically forced to break up because it was anticompetitive? > After the Air Mail scandal of 1934, the U.S. government concluded that such large holding companies as United Aircraft and Transport were anti-competitive, and new antitrust laws were passed forbidding airframe or engine manufacturers from having interests in airlines.
  - smabie 6y ago
    Yes, I am aware, but there's no reason why Boeing would be interested in the airline business today.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - nwienert 6y ago
      Because there’s more than 2 airlines competing so the margins are low.
    - mulmen 6y ago
      Because they were broken up to create a competitive marketplace which would not otherwise have existed. Also if Boeing were allowed to create an airline they could, say, not sell airliners to any other airline, or charge them much more. Or just pass on the airliner sales margins to consumers as lower fares... until the other airlines went out of business. But I guess the airlines could just make their own airplanes right?

BobbyJo 6y ago

I agree, but they should both be charged with colluding on pricing (neither can justify the prices and it's obvious no market price discovery ever happened.

nodamage 6y ago
Steam set a 30% rate years before the App Store or Play Store even existed, and the same rate is used across the industry in both console stores and physical stores. Accusing Apple and Google of colluding on pricing requires an enormous misunderstanding of what collusion actually means.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  I think the person is confused about prices settling at the same level with collusion. And the history as you point out. By their logic, all the supermarkets in my neighborhood are colluding on the price of tomatoes.
- pas 6y ago
  But installing software on Windows is not a problem. You can put your game in the Windows app store. There are multiple (gaming) "app store" things on Windows. Steam has a 30% cut because it's so big that the smaller stores don't move the needle much. So there's no real market force pushing prices down, because the other offerings are just not substitutes. (Eg. there's GOG Galaxy, the other ones are too tied to certain publishers.)

nmfisher 6y ago

While I broadly agree with your sentiments, Epic's issue here isn't the percentage commission per se. It's the fact that both Stores do not allow apps that circumvent Apple/Google's payment systems for in-app purchases (and in Apple's case, the fact that side-loading is prohibited, forcing you to use the App Store for any software you want to run on portable Apple devices). If you took a favourable interpretation, a 30% commission only becomes anti-competitive once Apple/Google take away any alternative. That being said, I don't agree with that and I'm still not clear what the legal basis for that argument is. I'm leaning towards Epic losing this one mightily.

judge2020 6y ago
One of their points in court was attacking the 30% since they do, indeed, love the traffic the App Store brings them (since not all players found Fortnite via EpicGames.com). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669192
- nmfisher 6y ago
  Of course they're going to attack the 30% as too high. Obviously, their best outcome is reducing that percentage to zero. But to get there, their argument obviously can't be "Apple is a monopoly allows it to extract 30%, which is too high, so we want it reduced to zero". That's not going to work. Rather, they get it to zero by saying "Apple is a monopoly and prevents competition by banning apps that implement their own payment processing system, so leave the 30% as-is but let any app implement its own payments". So the actual percentage, and the restriction against accepting payments outside Apple IAP, are two slightly different concerns. Reducing the percentage to 20% would obviously be a net financial win, but it's definitely not their main objective.

shirakawasuna 6y ago

Simply start your own major smartphone platform to compete with the duopoly, duh. Easy as that.

supernova87a 6y ago
Maybe it tells you something about the market dynamics and difficulty of technology that there are only 2. And maybe that produces the margins it does. If it's not easy, maybe you should think about why then. And not be so quick to dictate how things should be otherwise.
- mulmen 6y ago
  To add on, only two remaining. Multiple massive corporations with essentially unlimited funding and desire failed in this space repeatedly, some with enormous head starts. The thought that someone can simply start another mobile platform is naive bordering on absurd. This is an established market that clearly can support only one or two participants. We have seen this movie.
  - josefx 6y ago
    > This is an established market that clearly can support only one or two participants. It helps that the Google Play license would kill the existing product lines of any of the large phone manufacturers that tried. As far as I am aware courts seem to generally agree that Googles license is hilariously anti competitive in nature.
    - mulmen 6y ago
      I should have appended "in the current regulatory climate."
- jariel 6y ago
  " maybe you should think about why then" It's 'not easy' because the current monopolists will crush any attempt to take their turf - which is the whole point.

quotemstr 6y ago

"If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use is the rule?" Do we really want to live in a world in which a few tech companies get to shave 30% off of all the value produced by a significant portion of the entire economy? Why should we put up with that? Because we made a rule a long ago that in general companies can decide their own pricing structure and device policy? Is a slavish adherence to this rule worth making us all 30% poorer? Why? We can and should make an exceptionion to the general principle of corporate independence whenever we find ourselves in a situation in which a key piece of public infrastructure happens to be privately owned --- and app stores have definitely become public infrastructure). We shouldn't let a blind adherence to an abstraction prevent us from ensuring that this public infrastructure is run in the public interest.

supernova87a 6y ago
You need to carefully watch for yourself falling down the trap of growing the definition of what is an entitlement and what is not. An app store that sells games and voluntary entertainments is not a public infrastructure, operated in the public interest. That's almost laughable. And don't be so quick to conclude that now because you reap the benefits of a system that was previously set up, you can simply decide that you think the % is too high and take it back "in the public interest". Go ahead, propose that every company only be allowed a 5% markup on its costs. Let's see where that takes us.
- quotemstr 6y ago
  Don't you think it's at least plausible that app stores are natural monopolies like electrical service? And mobile devices really are a key part of almost everyone's life these days: why wouldn't the nearly-exclusive channel for software distribution to these devices be infrastructure important to the public? When you have a natural monopoly operating key public infrastructure, regulation is a clear and justifiable option.
  - supernova87a 6y ago
    You are confusing the concepts of a monopoly and a public utility.

strider3g 6y ago

ISP should also take a cut, I mean why not..they can... then the electric company can charge all of us a % ... why don’t camera companies get a cut of movie revenues... why don’t tv companies charge cable companies to work with one another, I mean... let’s just go for it

supernova87a 6y ago
They do.
- nrmitchi 6y ago
  They do not. What I pay an ISP is a monthly fee for them providing a service. I paid Apple/Google/manufacturer a fee when I purchased a device. My ISP does not receive more/less in fees each month based on how much online shopping I do.
0xfffafaCrash 6y ago
ISPs charge onerous prices already and they often have local monopolies enforced by local governments and public utilities (which create artificially high regulatory barriers to entry to eliminate competition [0]) as opposed to dominant market positions in a virtual space as a result of network effects and consumer choice. The government and regulatory bodies are so thoroughly captured that the government has actually made it illegal for municipalities to provide broadband across much of the U.S. [1]. The situation is similar, and in some cases worse, for power companies which are often granted local monopolies, immune from antitrust laws through their relations with local government, and guaranteed insane profits despite awful performance [2]. Using ISPs and power companies as an example for why more government intervention in more open virtual markets would be advisable is probably not a winning argument. [0] https://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-just-cable-companies-and-blame-local-government-for-dismal-broadband-competition/ https://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-ju... [1] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc... [2] https://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9287719/utilities-monopoly https://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9287719/utilities-monopoly

jariel 6y ago

" They could charge anything they like -- 100%. It's a voluntary contract, and Epic doesn't have to engage in it. We don't have to engage in it. There's no fundamental right to offer an app on an app store, and if the scope of the market is defined as the market for video games/content, then none of these places are monopolies and companies/people are free to set their desired prices." They are monopolies, or more precisely, an oligarchy. Mobile devices have become 'essential utility' not quite but almost like roads, internet access etc. and Google/Apple have absolute control. Imagine if Verizon and AT&T said: "We're going to charge 30% of all revenue derived form Internet Usage". What would be the difference? Could we just 'refuse to engage' and 'not use the internet'? We scream 'net neutrality' when it comes to network access, we need to recognize some of the same logic applies here as well. Sometimes it's hard to demonstrate 'consumer harm' when we don't know what the market would look like otherwise: in Canada, literally up until the 1980's, the telephone system was a de-facto government monopoly called 'Bell Telephone'. You had to buy everything from them, they set prices etc. etc.. Imagine what would happen if iOS and Android 'banned' anything other than Safari and Chrome. Imagine if theY forced Bing and Google only respectively as search engines and banned all others? How would we react? In much the same way Europe has required users have the ability to have the choice of Search, even default search, I think the minimum requirement would be to allow 3rd party apps and 3rd party app stores.

pjmlp 6y ago
> Imagine if Verizon and AT&T said: "We're going to charge 30% of all revenue derived form Internet Usage". Well, mobile operators used to charge up to 80% on their Symbian, J2ME, Windows CE/PocketPC, Blackberry, Brew stores.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mattigames 6y ago

That's strawman, Epic's fortnite is not one of the only 2 surviving videogames in the world, while Android and Apple are the only 2 mobile platforms; if Fornite was somehow one of the only 10 mobile games people had available at all I would agree but not in the current state of affairs.

weavejester 6y ago

"Who is the court, or any of us, to say what should* be the charge for selling a game on a marketplace?"* That falls under competition law. It's in a government's interests to encourage companies to compete with each other, and to prevent a single or a handful of companies explicitly or implicitly agreeing to control market pricing to the detriment of consumers. In this case, both Google and Apple set the same 30% pricing, and clearly neither have any incentive to rock the boat and compete with each other, and every incentive to dissuade or prevent other companies from creating competing app stores. When competition in a market fails, it's up to the courts or government to step in. "I find irony in many people who get probably so knee-jerk opposed to Google/Apple and "on Epic's side" will find themselves justifying why they should be free to set their own prices when they launch their next product." Its not hypocritical (or even ironic) to say that there should be different rules for companies operating as part of an oligopoly, compared to small business competing in a crowded marketplace.

supernova87a 6y ago
The state-overseen apparatus you might next jump to is a nightmare to me. You would be ok with different tax rates for different size corporations? A committee / agency to decide what is or is not an oligopoly? So, someone coming up with a new app that does something never done before, that would be a monopoly or oligopoly, right?
- stale2002 6y ago
  > A committee / agency to decide what is or is not an oligopoly? This is called our court system. And they have been handling anti-trust law for a century now. And they have done a pretty reasonable job of it. Anti-trust law is not something new. It is well established.
  - supernova87a 6y ago
    You are not calling for violations of a law to be tried between adversaries at court as an exception to normal business behavior. You are calling for the wholesale new regulation of business by the status and concentration of its market. A highly subjective and scope-dependent analysis specific to every company, every market, every industry. You should realize the difference. You think that's what the courts are supposed to do? You have a serious flaw in understanding what courts are for if so.

echelon 6y ago

Google and Apple have gotten too big. They're harming our industry. It's time to break them up. Besides, our devices are computers. The next evolution of laptops for most people. We should be able to run whatever software we want on them. Google and Apple purposefully acted like mafia to keep them as locked down as they could, while they both benefited from the web and open source to rise to and ultimately cement their position. Fuck them both.

supernova87a 6y ago
>Google and Apple have gotten too big. They're harming our industry. It's time to break them up. Besides, our devices are computers. The next evolution of laptops for most people. We should be able to run whatever software we want on them. Google and Apple purposefully acted like mafia to keep them as locked down as they could, while they both benefited from the web and open source to rise to and ultimately cement their position. Fuck them both. Now this is the kind of well-informed intelligent debate we need more of around here.
- echelon 6y ago
  > Now this is the kind of well-informed intelligent debate we need more of around here. You're being rude. I'm tired of companies profiting off open source while simultaneously closing down access to mainstream computing technology, harming the open web, imposing taxes, and limiting access. Tech was better in the 90's to early 2010s, before these companies got a stranglehold and executed Microsoft's failed vision of embrace, extend, extinguish on the internet. You shouldn't be able to sell a generic computer and control the only marketplace with which to get software onto it. Not in this country. It's a regression. These aren't silly, cheap gaming consoles where teenagers often have more than one. For many people, their phone represents their only access to the internet. It's how they conduct their life - banking/payments, job search, dating, contacting friends and loved ones, photos, and an endless myriad of other functions. A company shouldn't own that entire stack. You and I aren't going to agree, and that's fine. I'm writing my legislators. You write yours. The solutions I'm proposing to Lucy McBath are: 1. Requiring that phone operating systems allow installs from the web and/or USB. Companies are free to maintain their marketplace and charge whatever they want. 2. In the extreme case, break the companies up into hardware and software services. This is more relevant to Google, which has a dangerous control over advertising, search, and the browser. Their browser needs to be taken away, along with AMP and their interest in web standards.

Qwertious 6y ago

>Who is the court, or any of us, to say what should be the charge for selling a game on a marketplace? This comes down to what I call competitive capitalism VS Hobson's Choice capitalism. Android doesn't really have any competitors - Amazon, Samsung, they have zero legal access to the apps on the Google Play store unless they go through Android. As such, if they refuse to allow competitors to force them to compete, they have a responsibility to compete despite the lack of competition and if they refuse to do that it's the government's job to beat them until they comply. Again: the problem here isn't "freedom", it's competition. Your next product probably doesn't have a major captive sub-market. But let's address the " freedom" argument: what I call Hobson's Choice capitalism. "If you don't like it, you're free to rewrite the OS from scratch, then convince every single app on the app store to switch over while starting with no hardware support and no app support. This is a Hobson's Choice - it's not about making an improvement on Android, it's about making a unilateral improvement on the entire universe just to push Android forward. It's absurd and not a real choice. But more importantly, if you consider Hobson's Choice capitalism to be capitalism, then technically the government is equivalent to a private corporation as long as you can forfeit your citizenship and move to Somalia to be free of your country's obligations on you. This basically contradicts the standard definition of the free market, but that's the point - everyone rejects the Hobson's choice out of hand, because it's just so absurdly irrelevant to competition. So let's talk about competition: would Google rather take a lower cut, or legally permit Amazon and Tizen to access Google Play apps from their non-Android OSes? Because right now, they're not competing. They're just sitting on their chicken-egg problem based laurels. As for Epic: I sort of agree with your pejorative - copyright is intended to provide funding, but the right it actually grants is the right to deny a copy. Some companies simply sit on copyright they never actually intend to monetize, and others keep hold of it far longer than they need to make a healthy profit proportionate to its success. The notion that all copyright needs the exact sake period is also absurd, as some industries are much more fast-moving than others. I think we need to take a long, hard look at copyright monopolies, starting with the absurd "lifetime plus 70 years" duration.

happymellon 6y ago

Epic have bought up games and moved them to their store which, as a Windows only platform, has reduced choice. They should totally get regulated as well since they are reducing competition. If it wasn't run by a complete and utter dickhead I may have more sympathy.

Reelin 6y ago
The Epic Games Store officially supports both Windows and macOS. It runs on Linux via Lutris, and they even paid them a grant for that purpose. (Of course I'd prefer official Linux support. It seems odd to support Android but not Linux.) Is there some particular reason you don't like Tim Sweeney beyond his failure to be a diehard Linux crusader?
- happymellon 6y ago
  He has taken games that supported Linux and dropped that support because he is a jerk. You don't have to be a "diehard Linux crusader" to see that dropping support from a platform because your store doesn't support it is a shitty move. Running the Windows version of Linux software via Wine isn't support.

riantogo 6y ago

You are not wrong. But your world view is a bit too simplistic. Real world is a messy place. Hence consumer protection is a thing.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

stale2002 6y ago

Alright, now lets say microsoft did the exact same behavior, on every single PC. And made it impossible for you to install unapproved apps that did not give them a cut. Would you really believe that such behavior would not break anti-trust law? Because the courts already ruled against microsoft in a much less extreme situation. And furthermore, are you really OK with that behavior, if microsoft forced every single windows PC in the world, to disallow unapproved apps? > The argument that 30% is unfair goes nowhere in court -- so what should it be? The lawsuit has nothing to do with the 30% cut. Instead it has to do with Google and Apple engaging in anti-competitive behavior, and using their significant market power to prevent competition. They should not be forced to change their price. Instead, they should be force to stop their anti-competitive behavior, and allow other apps to be installed, in an easier way (in Apple's case), where as Google should be stopped from forcing OEM providers to not preload the epic app store. > why they should be free to set their own prices It has nothing to do with price setting. That is nowhere in the lawsuit. Instead, Epic is trying to stop anti-competitive behavior.

hajile 6y ago

You are wrong because it's not a free market. Get rid of the patents and hundred-year copyright monopoly grants then we'll talk. If a monopoly is created and enforced by the state, it is their duty to regulate it.

hhjinks 6y ago

> Epic doesn't have to engage in it. We don't have to engage in it They do if they want to be on the mobile market, as evident by them being kicked off 98% of the mobile market when they decided to not engage in it.