In normal markets there are competitors who force each other to keep reasonable profit margins and to improve their product as opposed to milking other people's hard work at the expense of the consumer.

The consumer is willing to pay the price based on the perceived value from the App Store

Collective action by the creators would help.

All they have to do is dual-host (a fairly trivial matter, compared to organised collective action). What would make things even better is if they dual host on a competing platform and specify in their content that the competing platform charges lower fees. If even 10% of the creators did this:

1. Many of the consumers would switch. 2. Many of the creators not on the competing platform would also offer dual-hosting.

The problem is not "As a creator you have no choice but to accept whatever fees Apple, Google, Steam etc set". The problem is the mindset that their content is not their own.

I say it's their mindset, because they certainly don't act as if they own the content - when your content is available only via a single channel, you don't own your content, you are simply a supplier for that channel.

Apple will ban you for this.

How? I thought it was a Patreon thing - the "competing platform" would be competing with the Patreon app.

I'm not familiar with Patreon, but I thought the way it worked was that you could tip content creators via the Patreon app. I'm pretty certain that Apple cannot tell Patreon (a third party) that they are only allowed to offer exclusive content.

To me this is the thing that should be outlawed. Let people pay the Apple tax if they want, but don’t prevent people from making other arrangements. Most people are lazy and will pay the tax, if it isn’t excessive.

"No one needs app" is not the same as "No one has biological mandatory need to have an app"

there could also be cases where cutting back to $Z profits might be preferable in case not doing so were to prompt legislation causing someone to be forcibly cut to $Z-1 or even $0 profits from a particular profit source.

Which it has been my observation that when someone is saying "X could reduce price by $Y and still make $Z profits" it often coincides with saying therefore company X should be legislated on this particular profit source.

Note: $X didn't make much rhetorical sense.

Not in an environment where regulatory capture costs so much less than any change legislation could bring. The remedy in almost every recent monopoly case has been remarkably nothing. Politicians don’t actually want change, they want the threat of legislation so that industries bring truckloads of money to line their pockets.

At this point the regulators should investigate what the barriers are to new entrants and if it's too costly and nobody has managed to cut in the last few years, establishing some rules is probably a good thing. This happens as industries mature and become critical, it happened in transportation (most bus, train companies), energy, water supply, trash, etc, depending on the country and market conditions.

Google is moving in that direction.

Until it turns into cancer because of unrestrained growth.

Like it or not capitalism is a part of an ecosystem. We’ve been “educated” to believe that unrestrained growth in profits is what makes capitalism work, and yet day after day there are fresh examples of how our experience as consumers has gotten worse under capitalism because of the idea that profits should forever be growing.