In your vending machine example, it is a transaction, not a tax, as you implied and I agree. However Apple taking cut of app's revenue is awfully a lot like corporate tax.
In that case are transaction fees for credit cards also tax? Or PayPal fees for that matter? Or fees for using platforms like eBay and Aliexpress?
Re:Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
by Dylan16807 on Saturday March 16, 2019 @07:26PM
(#19411078)
Yes, I'd call any small mostly-percentage-based transaction fee that a platform imposes a "tax" or "platform tax".
If you were to scope it to 'services' or 'platform', then perhaps we should call virtual hosting cost not cost but tax :p and if you rent a movie, that'd then be movie tax, or rental tax? But what about actual tax, are we going to call that tax tax? Because at this point people just start using the word tax for every generic transaction.