> Yes, but they don’t currently offer it for iPhone apps and games.
Isn't the whole premise that they want to be in that market and Apple precludes it?
> ~3% is also generally what you can expect to pay a payment processor to begin with
But that's kind of the point. If Apple is charging more than that for payment processing but then only refunding the ordinary amount when you don't use their service, it precludes anyone else from competing with them on price because the customer is still paying Apple the remainder of Apple's payment processing fee which isn't refunded.
The way to evaluate this isn't to look at what payment processors charge, it's to look at what the rest of what Apple ostensibly charges for would cost in a competitive market.
At which point the first thing you'd have to ask is, why is this still a percent of revenue? It is for payment processors because their fee has to account for fraud risk, which scales with the amount of the payment being processed.
Fees as a percent of revenue are quite unusual for providing any kind of hosting services or marketing or development tools etc. Even sales commissions are a percent of the sales attributable to the salesperson, not a percent of all sales including the ones via other sales channels.
Charging a percent of revenue is a strong indication of a monopoly rent because it's so hard for anyone but a monopolist to get away with it. Even when Visa does it, the fraud risk is more of a fig leaf and the truth is a big chunk of that amount is going to fund credit card rewards programs intended to get people to prefer credit cards to other payment alternatives and the credit card networks only get away with charging it because of the weak competition.
And in any event the balance of what Apple provides is typically extremely inexpensive. Development tools are widely available for free, search engines don't charge to be included in search results (and the fee can't be for search advertising when it's paid by everyone), the per-download hosting cost for an average-sized app on Amazon S3 rounds to zero cents. What are they doing that could explain 27% if it isn't a monopoly rent? Why is it 12% for smaller entities, when economies of scale go the other way?
> Judges don’t usually want to get into the business of setting prices for private businesses.
Which is why the better solution is to prevent this kind of tying of products and services together, so the prices can be set individually by the market instead of trying to disambiguate the price of each service when they're all tied together.
Isn't the whole premise that they want to be in that market and Apple precludes it?
> ~3% is also generally what you can expect to pay a payment processor to begin with
But that's kind of the point. If Apple is charging more than that for payment processing but then only refunding the ordinary amount when you don't use their service, it precludes anyone else from competing with them on price because the customer is still paying Apple the remainder of Apple's payment processing fee which isn't refunded.
The way to evaluate this isn't to look at what payment processors charge, it's to look at what the rest of what Apple ostensibly charges for would cost in a competitive market.
At which point the first thing you'd have to ask is, why is this still a percent of revenue? It is for payment processors because their fee has to account for fraud risk, which scales with the amount of the payment being processed.
Fees as a percent of revenue are quite unusual for providing any kind of hosting services or marketing or development tools etc. Even sales commissions are a percent of the sales attributable to the salesperson, not a percent of all sales including the ones via other sales channels.
Charging a percent of revenue is a strong indication of a monopoly rent because it's so hard for anyone but a monopolist to get away with it. Even when Visa does it, the fraud risk is more of a fig leaf and the truth is a big chunk of that amount is going to fund credit card rewards programs intended to get people to prefer credit cards to other payment alternatives and the credit card networks only get away with charging it because of the weak competition.
And in any event the balance of what Apple provides is typically extremely inexpensive. Development tools are widely available for free, search engines don't charge to be included in search results (and the fee can't be for search advertising when it's paid by everyone), the per-download hosting cost for an average-sized app on Amazon S3 rounds to zero cents. What are they doing that could explain 27% if it isn't a monopoly rent? Why is it 12% for smaller entities, when economies of scale go the other way?
> Judges don’t usually want to get into the business of setting prices for private businesses.
Which is why the better solution is to prevent this kind of tying of products and services together, so the prices can be set individually by the market instead of trying to disambiguate the price of each service when they're all tied together.