With Big Tech under dramatically more stringent antitrust oversight in recent years, I frequently return to the same advice: Learn the lessons of Microsoft Past and negotiate with regulators from a position of strength instead of gambling that you will somehow come out ahead in cases where you are clearly breaking the law. To date, the biggest and worst offenders, Apple and Google, have ignored history and fought tooth and nail to preserve their outrageous and unfair app store fees and retain control of their respective app ecosystems. Indeed, it appears that Google’s strategy has been simply to copy what Apple does. And Apple’s strategy has been to never give ground, even when it ran afoul of the law and its own self-righteous marketing. Not to mention common-sense and basic decency. But this is starting to change. Finally. Today, Epic Games and Google agreed to settle their five-year-old antitrust lawsuit. This is incredible on several levels. First, Epic Games didn’t just defeat Google in Epic v. Google, it manhandled the online giant like it was child’s play, with Google losing every possible appeal along the way. But the settlement wrung even more concessions out of Google than the original ruling, key among them the first-ever reversal of the company’s egregious app store fee structure. And that will now become a precedent that current and future plaintiffs can point to as they try to dismantle its unfair app store fees and policies. This was avoidable. Indeed, Apple and Google both could have emerged from this era of heightened scrutiny with their unfair fees and policies in place had they simply worked with antitrust regulators. Years ago, I pointed out that had Apple and Google simply lowered their fees to 10 or 12 percent, levels that are still unfair and unwarranted, they would never have been in this mess to begin with. But Apple, of course, dug its hole even deeper by going in the exact opposite direction and engaging in a policy of belligerent non-compliance after having been found, in multiple cases, to not be meeting its legal requirements. Everyone has opinions on this topic. But I’m tired of pretending that most of those opinions aren’t uneducated and ridiculously pro-Big Tech and anti-consumer. Here’s what’s objectively true: Apple’s 30 percent fee structure was arbitrary from the get-go and not based in any way on the cost of the services it provides developers. Apple’s redefinition of how computing platforms work, by charging developers for the “right” to publish apps on a computing platform while restricting their capabilities and preventing them from communicating with their own customers, was unprecedented. In the past, platform makers would pull out all the stops to attract developers to their platforms because that’s where the value equation started. More developers make more apps and attract more users; more users attract more developers who will make more apps. The post Well, That Settles That ⭐ appeared first on Thurrott. com.
