No. How is this at all promoting innovation? The practical effect of this would be to allow crappy companies to stay alive as zombies, doing the opposite of promoting innovation. This would also encourage companies to split into a hojillion shell companies to qualify themselves as what you define "the bottom 25%."

This isn't even speculation. If you look at states' tax credit programs to "encourage innovation" in x industry, you see those tax credits are absorbed by the best of financial engineers.

The more levers, and thus complexity, you create in an economy, the more likely that it's the extreme wealthy who benefit.

In any case, the point of what I was saying was to help fund strong competitors. You could just as well transfer funds from the top 10% to the third and fourth deciles.

A company dying means the people in it would be available to other companies, where they could potentially find better things to do. Very different from a person suffering from poverty (where welfare and such has its place).

This will result in a boatload of scam and zero innovation.

Is is not possible that the bottom 25% is there for a reason, that they failed or their product is not viewed as innovative by the public?

I fail to see how this wealth redistribution scheme would be effective or produce the stated outcome. Like most wealth redistribution scheme it is lofty on the goal, but unclear on the results with no objective measurements and not real way to assess its value. It is more a "do it and assume it was successful" program like many government program are

The economics occurring atop the Apple platform should not belong to Apple. Apple created a great product in the iPhone, they slayed the competition, and they have forever positioned themselves as 50+% of American computing. They're making boat loads of profit on hardware sales, accessory sales, first party services and subscriptions. This should not come with the right to tax almost everything happening in mobile computing.

Apple is not innovating in the dating space, the gaming space, the business management space, or the productivity space. They are taxing these industries simply because they established themselves as the toll keep of the winning platform.

None of these companies cares about Apple. They're only building in Objective-C/Swift/iOS because that's what won the market. They'd be much happier to build for an open web platform, but Apple has artificially knee-capped it. Web apps suck because of Apple.

Apple needs to be told by the government this isn't okay. This won't hurt Apple in the slightest. They have a dragon's hoard of cash, will still have the best mobile platform, and have a ton of other incredible revenue streams.

They need to let their stranglehold go so that others can grow too.

Imagine if the roads were 50% Tesla and Tesla took 30% of every Amazon delivery, every trip to the grocery store, and every date you went on. That's what Apple is doing right now. It sounds absurd because it is.