Glyph
As someone who genuinely loves many apple products and would like to see the company do better, this makes me very happy. As @mcc has previously noted, my expectations for the outcome of this process are low (the antitrust system in the US famously does not function very well) but the rhetoric _alone_ here has the chance of changing some behavior. https://toot.cafe/@slightlyoff/112134855225973806
Alex Russell (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image Governments around the world have found exactly this every time they've looked hard at Apple keeping competing browsers at bay, but crikey. The DOJ is not playing around:

Toot Café
Mar 21, 2024 at 11:26pmWeb
Show threadGlyphMar 21, 2024
Even if you're an Apple stan and think the company really has no motivation but a sincere desire to protect users, and government regulators are bad product designers and this will make things worse… even so, this is Apple's fault. The handwriting has been on the wall for years. They should've figured out a way to *self*-regulate by now. Because the *appearance* of impropriety clearly exists, and has now been called out on multiple continents. This is not one regulator with a bias.
Show threadGlyphMar 21, 2024
(For the record I am not a stan. I do personally know that many *people* within the company sincerely desire to protect users' privacy, but that is not how the motivations of companies work. The company is motivated to make a profit and anyone with ideas that stand in the way of that will gradually be replaced or disempowered. Many apple employees have done many things to protect users, but many have also done things which harm users. It's a big place.)
Show threadRagashingoMar 22, 2024

@glyph @joesteel Yeah. Some of the worst App Store policies, for instance, were clearly morally wrong. Like preventing companies from linking out to their own subscription pages. Whatever short term extra profit Apple made off of that was clearly not worth antagonizing their developers over, much less the government!

I'd rather Apple just sell iPhones and make vast amounts of money that way than try to get a cut of every single service running on its platform...

Show threadSalvoMar 22, 2024
@glyph @caseyliss
This is all Eddie’s fault for not reducing the 30% to something reasonable decades ago.
Show threadChancerubbageMar 22, 2024

@Salvo @glyph @caseyliss

One of the reasons behind maintaining a 30% cut beyond profits for quarterly performance is I think they considered it a deterrent against in app purchases, which were becoming a huge customer service (refund) issue as kids were hitting those one armed bandits without parental supervision. And there created, increased operation costs, needing a slush fund to refund from.

Show threadSalvoMar 22, 2024

@Chancerubbage @glyph @caseyliss
It was never a deterany because the scammers didn’t care how much they made.

Apple should have never let lootbox-style purchases for these games. It makes them just as complicit as the scammers.

Show threadAbazigalMar 22, 2024
@Salvo Companies like Epic aren’t willing to pay anything over zero percent. I honestly don’t see any cut that would have appeased its most rabid detractors.
Show threadMarkVMar 22, 2024
@Abazigal @Salvo I think Epic's case is pretty specific though. Apple says they take 30% because they deserve to be compensated for API development. But most games aren't using much of Apple's APIs - they may be using Epic's Unreal engine instead, and they'd still be paying 30% to Apple and only 5% to Epic. I don't think Epic's issue is so much that it wants to pay Apple less for its own games, but that it wants to be able to get a bigger cut for the use of its own engine & its own app store.
Show threadSean KennedyMar 22, 2024
@glyph @caseyliss I think there is a quite good chance that had Apple “self regulated” they would have still faced a lawsuit but the goal posts moved even closer.
Show threadillustroMar 22, 2024

@glyph this whole situation is almost a textbook example of why self-regulation as a concept doesn't work.

The incentives of those being "self-regulated" are not aligned with the public that their "regulating" is meant to be protecting.

Entities don't care about negative externalities. One prominent Apple example is the non-interoperability of iMessage group chats with non iMessage messages and the security implications of that. No one but Apple was happy with the Apple implementation.

Show threadRhys MorganMar 22, 2024

@glyph @caseyliss Without a doubt. Simply allowing (heavily restricted!) third-party in-app payment processors, such as Stripe, PayPal, etc. and allowing companies like Amazon and Spotify to do IAPs by processing their own payments (without a huge, continual finder’s fee) would have stopped pretty much all of this.

I don’t get why Apple feel entitled to $$$ for digital goods that haven’t gone via their servers, that companies don’t want processed by Apple.