I agree with you, the say I have framed is.

I say Cisco should charge for every packet that goes through their router that is involved in a Financial transaction. If you don't pay, they add you to a blacklist. It's feasible, router has a blacklist, Cisco checks if you make money, if you do, they shake you down, if you don't pay, they add you to the blacklist and router downloads and refuses to route your IP addresses. Sounds ridiculous, but it's doable. After all they are facilitating the transaction.

Please don't give Cisco any ideas as they'll surely be doing this soon enough

What about video game consoles? Early in a generation, they are sold at razor-thin (or negative) margins, with the expectation that the manufacturer will recoup losses from licensing fees over the life of the console and that costs will come down in later revisions.

If manufacturers lose their substantial licensing fees, they would be forced to charge more upfront for the consoles which is objectively worse for consumers.

Consoles are much, much narrower in use than smartphones. Most consoles have a few thousand titles, if that. By comparison the App Store had millions of applications. And as you point out, manufacturers are building these consoles at a loss. Apple builds it's phones at a profit. Getting a game approved for sale on a console is much more involved than releasing an App on the App Store, and involves significant manual review not just of the quality of the game but also the content.

Apple does a manual review of the quality of their apps as well as their content (e.g. if you own a social app that allows users to publish images, they will verify there are no adult images being published and there are systems in place for banning these images.)

That doesn't sound like a good thing to me. Why must we be held to some extra moral laws for the ability to allow ios users to use our software?

Everyone here seems to be obsessed with the fact that a console is a "computer" in the turing machine sense but the fact is that people buy consoles with the strong primary purpose of entertainment.

Smart phones and tablets have gotten to the point where they are expected to be able to do hundreds of different things, with some peoples livelihood dependent on it.

There’s no legal way to define the boundary between what’s classified as a computer vs a console. Game consoles have apps that are traditional to a computer, such as streaming video and even video editing. Portability isn’t a reliable indicator as you have systems like the Switch.

Nor is it realistically possible to create legal guidelines based on profit margins. I don’t see how it makes sense to apply a different set of rules on devices that are sold as a loss and make up for it in software sales vs the inverse or even both being profitable.

And yet even then, console games such as MMOs are not required to actively mislead the consumer about their account management options.

Can't wait for Apple to cut the App Store back to a thousand apps so they qualify as a console.

I don't know how this myth keep perpetuating but ps4 pro was profitable from day one and ps4 6 months in. Hardware has gotten a lot cheaper.

> The European Commission has fined Qualcomm €242 million for abusing its market dominance in 3G baseband chipsets. Qualcomm sold below cost, with the aim of forcing its competitor Icera out of the market. This is illegal under EU antitrust rules.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_19_...

Would consumer really be objectively worse? The small margins are only early in a generation that last 7 years. The hard core gamers will need to pay more to get a console but the consoles would quickly drop in price. Also, the games would likely be much cheaper.

Would it be objectively worse for consumers? You buy an expensive machine once every ten years and then the games would be more reasonably priced for that whole time? How can you say with certainty that would be worse?

Because consumers don’t think long term. If your console costs $600 but games are $40 while your competitor’s costs $400 but games are $60, the vast majority of consumers will choose the $400/$60 one.

Unless they are Nintendo, where they make money on both console sales and licensing fees.

Microsoft also appears to have solved that issue with their game pass opening and many game studio acquisitions.

If you're an end user --- don't buy Apple.

If you're a developer --- don't build for Apple.

Problem solved.

In theory; yes. In practice; not quite enough.

Apple is doing everything it can to stop the customer from being informed. As a developer, you are not allowed to tell your customers how much of a cut Apple gets.

This has to change.

This is the solution. I'm sorry, but an iPhone is not a human right. If you don't like it or the company practice, don't support it Legislation is not the answer here.

> Just imagine if Microsoft had taken a 30% cut from every developer who ever compiled software for windows

Microsoft has the whole code-signing racket going on for Windows, but that's at least a flat fee in fairness.

Yeah. That’s another good example of abusing a market position to limit options to incumbents. I’d love to have LE style domain validate code signing certificates.

> Apple is nothing else but the digital equivalent of a landlord extracting economic rents from everyone in the ecosystem. It's time to put an end to it, and while we're at it the same goes for all the other platform owners.

And while we're at it, implement a Georgist tax scheme on landlords.

There is a benefit. The prevention of side loading limits malware. Windows is ridden with malware.

How is it BS for a private company to say they don't want to take money from a group like Stormfront?

Well, then don't ask for the EU to legislate that payment processors can't drop customers. You can't have it both ways...

I'm not comfortable having the US government tell Apple what entities they are obligated to do business with.

When you will build your own piece of land from scratch then you also get to decide what laws govern it.

The iPhone, iOS and the Apple Store exist because someone had the idea, will and spent tons of money building it. They aren't natural resources that Apple acquired and imposed on people so now everyone else has no choice but to pay the Apple tax.

So I don't see how that analogy applies here.

>When you will build your own piece of land from scratch then you also get to decide what laws govern it.

I don't know where you live but where I do the government determines laws, on my property or otherwise. i can't just do what i want on my property just because it's my property. Neither my actual land or the digital land of the app store are some sort of extraterritorial space, we're not living in the Shadowrun universe

What about the products of my labor that I create from scratch? Can I decide what laws govern that too? You know, like taxes?

That idea went out the window a long time ago. Now we are all beholden to each-other and society on some level, so best we deal with it and solve these anti-competative issues and predatory platforms, otherwise let's agree that it's completely immoral and stop cherry-picking "moral rules" based on what we find useful at the time.

> Just imagine if Microsoft had taken a 30% cut from every developer who ever compiled software for windows

How does this relate to this discussion?

Just inserting "30%" into ANY financial transaction and drawing a comparison is a false equivalency.

If I could, I would downvote this.