Neither Comcast or Apple provide any infrastructure to Basecamp for hosting. They are just in charge of delivering the ways and means of accessing their platform.
But they do what they do, and they charge what they charge. The comment I replied to, said Apple provides no infrastructure. That is categorically false, and thus I replied.
Positing alternate realities where they might operate differently isn't really a relevant response, IMO.
I don’t know why people expect Apple to be the kind of company that would behave in a way that is antithetical to itself and in many ways it’s own customers out of a puritanical devotion to ‘openness’. Most of these ‘Apple could’ changes would cripple the product.
If I could block apps from network access, including apple apps, then that would prove they're not playing both sides.
Not exactly, as Comcast don’t provide the infrastructure to Basecamp to host and deliver the binary of its app. Basecamp can’t be said to be ‘freeloading’ on Comcast.
Basecamp would come back and say ‘well, we pay our developer fees’ but developer fees don’t differentiate whether Apple has to maintain app updates for hundreds of downloads or millions.
Edit: Was clearly referring to the app binary.