The US has the same power as the CCP, it’s just that the US & CCP legal frameworks are different
Apple does not have the power or authority to tell the USG to pound sand:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
There is already a backdoor in the iPhone, and Apple already preserves it for the FBI.
You can also skip backups entirely if you want.
They wouldn't be the ones being pressured. Instead it would be lawmakers.
The EU has already passed a law, and the USA is considering one, that has already passed out of committee.
Governments can just start confiscating Apple's funds. What, is there going to be an Apple private military, that invades bank of America, and forces them at gone point to not follow a court order? Yeah no. The courts will order them to pay money, and the banks will send the money, no matter what Apple thinks.
The Fines in EU would be something like 10% of global revenue. They can't ignore that.
No sympathy for Coinbase or any other app participating in the system.
One of the benefits of Apple's enforcement here is their extremely generous refund policy. If you ever buy something by accident (or even on purpose, really, and just later regret it) you can ask Apple for a refund and it's almost guaranteed they grant it.
Obviously crypto users don't really think about refunds because nothing is reversible… although who knows, maybe they do.
Honestly, Apple and Google should ban ALL software crypto wallets. No one is checking to see how secure they are. A seed generated on a software wallet may appear random to the user, but there is NO REASON AT ALL to believe that it is, and no way to verify that it is. IMO every iOS software wallet is compromised simply by virtue of the fact that it's impossible to know whether the seed was generated securely.
I 100% guarantee you there will eventually be a massive "hack" on a major iOS software wallet which is nothing more than the person who wrote the code intentionally making it such that they know how the seed is generated. It would be trivial to generate seeds that appear random but are based on nothing more than a passphrase you know and a timestamp that you can increment over, allowing you at any time to generate all possible private keys for every wallet ever made with your app. That app is probably already out there and people are using it, blissfully unaware that at any time all their crypto could just disappear. If the attacker is smart they can later patch the app, remove their proprietary seed generation and no one will EVER know. They can drain wallets randomly and everyone will assume that the victim must be responsible for the compromised seed, when in reality it was compromised on generation. The attacker will never get caught. I would be honestly surprised if this isn't happening right now.
It's not a technical problem to be solved, it's part of the terms for using the platform.
And crypto is looking for a use case.
Buy NFT to access this app features.
See?
They've lost it.
A vase is a tangible real-world product. That falls under the "Apple Pay" contract route, and only if you want to use Apple Pay.
This coinbase thing, afaik, is for a digital product.
Coinbase could workaround all this if they simply launch a web browser to do the purchases, in my view.
As far as money goes, both companies have enough to be able to see a lawsuit through to completion.
So it doesn't matter much that Apple has "more money, power and influence". Coinbase would either have a case or have no case, irrespective of those factors.
Same happened during the SCO–Linux disputes.
Sure it's true that if one party can't afford legal representation, the other party will have a better outcome. But that's not the case here.
They would work out in such a way as to respect the law as written. The law as written in Texas is to outlaw abortion.
A Coinbase vs Apple lawsuit would likewise work out in such a way as to respect the law as written.
That's the point I've been arguing. What's yours?
Precedent is itself no more than an interpretation of law, in other words a line of legal reasoning that's already been ossified. I probably edited out the part about precedent because I felt it was redundant to "legal reasoning".
In any case, I don't see how "precedent" makes or breaks anyone's argument here.
Just be ready to deal with any problems yourself.
There is some inherent subjectivity to "roughly proportional to the value being added", but in my opinion, it becomes reasonably objective at some point when the value isn't being added. Not 100%, but reasonably so. I think part of the problem with Apple's policy here is that it is another example of trying to jam too large a set of cases into the roof of one policy, a pervasive problem right now with many Silicon Valley-style businesses that try to substitute expensive human insight with cheap computer code for economic decisions. There are perhaps cases where 30% is justified, because Apple is providing that much value to the target transaction. I'll leave that to the reader to decide.
But there are clearly other sorts of transactions that were going to take place anyhow, and it basically just happens to be taking place through an app. Apple did not introduce any significant number of people to Coinbase by putting the Coinbase app on the store. It does not provide a huge amount of service to Coinbase on a per-transaction basis; Coinbase has the financial infrastructure, the technical infrastructure, etc. One way you can tell Apple is not terribly involved is, what are they responsible for in this case? Not very much; even if Apple totally vaporized and all Apple services disappeared, the user could still perform the target transaction on a different platform with virtually no effort. Contrast with the answer to "what if Coinbase totally vaporized and all their services disappeared?" This transaction would become impossible.
For a transaction like this, where Apple did no marketing, where Apple provides essentially no irreplaceable technical service, where the transaction can trivially be done elsewhere and it is just happening to occur on Apple services, where the value flow doesn't need to involve Apple at all, a 30% charge seems outrageously large.
I think some of the problem in debating this, and arguably all the way down to people understanding this, is that both these cases exist simultaneously, and they are both "true". There are apps that exist and thrive only because of Apple infrastructure, services, and promotion. 30% doesn't seem unreasonable, at least in the abstract. But other apps don't have anything like that service or support from Apple, but get hit with the exact same fee. This is the sort of thing that really starts to look like monopolistic rent seeking. (Or at least oligopolistic rent seeking.)
Personally I am more concerned about Comcast's monopoly and would prioritize the FTC to look at that, but that's been out of style since 2014.
Also - does Apple take 30% from each Amazon purchase? I overwhelmingly just use the Amazon app for purchasing - I can't imagine the amount of money Apple makes from Amazon alone, if so.
If Fidelity sold you app skins and customization features they’d have to pay
Tickets as NFTs are an absolutely valid use for example, and many others.
Coinbase does not get gas fees to complete the transaction. This isn't a swap. This isn't an exchange for ETH.
Absurd and I've downvoted you.
It also highlights the insanity of the app store rules. I though Facebook being blocked from showing the percentage of purchases being sent to Apple was peak ridiculousness, but this is yet another step.
Doesn't matter that it's gas. It's a purchase the user is trying to make. The rules apply.
Coinbase may think it's unfair, but that's what they agreed to when they put the app in the App Store. Apple can continue to enforce this rule as long as they're legally allowed to, which doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon.
No sympathy for Coinbase here. They chose to whine in public when they could just sue Apple like a grown up.