Yesterday I wrote a sort of review of Kurt Andersen’s Evil Geniuses, which documents the myriad ways in which our country has been hijacked by the ultra-rich, who have succeeded marvelously in either repealing restraints under which they previously operated, or convincing the government and/or the courts to not enforce laws that theoretically restrain them.
Today I stumbled upon this article, covering litigation between Apple and Epic Games. It is one small example of the sort of thing Andersen writes about, behavior that would have been unthinkable 40 years ago.
Apple has expelled Epic from the App Store, as Epic tried to do a work around to deprive Apple of the vig that it extracts every time someone buys something on the App Store. Bear in mind that there is literally no other way to market IOS apps other than in the App Store.
I’m not an antitrust expert, but it’s hard to see how this is not a restraint of trade. Apple has the nerve to say that allowing Epic to avoid Apple’s exorbitant charges (30%, I believe) “ is not fair to all other developers on the App Store and is putting customers in the middle of their fight”. My guess is that most developers would love to see Epic win.
Apple is now worth two trillion dollars, in large part because of the fact that it has been able to get away with restricting access to it’s mobile operating system. Recall that only about 20 years ago, Microsoft was in hot water because it made it difficult to switch default browsers in Windows. It wasn’t really all that hard, and it didn’t cost anything to do it. Apple, years after the introduction of iOS, is finally going to allow customers to switch default browsers in iOS with the next update to the operating system, but it will still get 30% of whatever those browser developers charge.
Needless to say, the ultimate losers are the customers. It doesn’t take a degree in mathematics to figure out that we’d be paying less for apps if Apple couldn’t take such a giant cut, and, just maybe, the ridiculous app subscription model would never have taken off as it has.
My guess is that Apple will ultimately prevail in the litigation. The courts have effectively neutered the antitrust laws and there’s no such thing as an unfair trade practice anymore when giant corporations are involved. If we really want to take our country back, we have to tame these corporations and vigourous enforcement of anti-trust and unfair trade practice laws should be a big part of it.