Wow. If true, that looks an awful lot like outright fraud.

Right. What this also means is that the existing customers should have to enter into a new contract with the new company. If they treated a subset of customers as ongoing contracts and continued to provide service, rather than forcing everyone to sign up for service fresh, they have a real problem, because that makes them look an awful lot like a successor company.

Not really. The Church actually played a significant role in genetics (Mendel) and lots of other scientific advancements over the millennia. Yes, there are exceptions in the early history of the Church (and in the history of other religions as well, I suspect), but for the most part, science and religion have coexisted. Science tells the "how", religion postulates about the "why".

It's more accurate to say that religion preaches against allowing technology to destroy our humanity, values, ethics, morals, etc. For example, when AI is used to make things better for everyone, that's fine, but we should be careful to ensure that it is always used in a way that preserves the dignity of workers, as opposed to putting people out of work en masse just because AI can do something cheaper.

Well, I mean, the pope does have to be a man, so if the Church somehow starts to accept trans equality before it fully accepts gender equality, then I guess it could happen, in theory.

And then there's the (probably apocryphal) story of Pope Joan. :-D

Same for those of us who have hit the limit for how many names our brains can store, and end up with high latency recall (especially when encountering people out of context).

Give them a few months for the additional stress caused by the bad caps to cause the T-CON board to fail. :-)

Fiscal years don't always align with calendar years. For example, Apple's fiscal year starts on the last Sunday of September.

There's a non sequitur here. We were talking about minimum wage increasing based on a government-planned schedule by a fixed percentage every year. And now you're talking about paying people in response to workers paying more. These are two unrelated reasons for increased pay.

But again, paying people more does not result in better workers if everyone is paying more, because there will still be people paying proportionally more than you are, so you'll still get the workers at the same tier in relative terms. There is no return on that investment unless the increase in pay is voluntary on a company-specific basis. When the entire industry increases pay, it has no effect on where workers land, and doubly so when the entire country increases pay.

True. And in years when the amount of that constant increase is too small for inflation, it is worse for workers because they can't afford to live. And in years when the amount of that constant increase is too large for inflation, it is worse for workers because it causes companies to look harder at automation, which reduces the size of the workforce. In both cases, the workers lose.

You don't have to be on it to pay attention to it. As long as we ignore the skyrocketing cost of medical care (which is a problem largely because we don't have a functioning single-payer health insurance system like pretty much every other first-world country does), CPI-W is a decent metric for what people actually spend on living from month to month.

No, that's not what I said. Not at all. You're completely mischaracterizing how cost-of-living adjustments work, for one thing, and you're completely mischaracterizing what I said, for another.

What I said was that the cost-of-living adjustment is usually fairly reasonable percentage-wise at the moment it happens. But by three months later, if someone is living so close to their means on Social Security that they can't absorb month-to-month cost-of-living changes, then the cost-of-living adjustment may not be good enough for them, because their base pay is too low to begin with.

And that will likely be true for people earning minimum wage, but with the obvious caveat that this encourages them to work hard to learn skills that will pay them more than minimum wage, and then they'll be in better shape to handle monthly fluctuations in the cost of living.

The fact that they aren't retired, and thus can change jobs, makes it a very different situation even if all else is equal.

I think you would see it all the time if the current ruling party got its way. Remember that the party that's currently in charge in the U.S. has prevented increases to the minimum wage over and over again, year after year. Do you honestly think they're going to set a policy that would increase the minimum wage at a target rate that's higher than inflation in the future? The line about insanity being doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results comes to mind here.

For one thing, it won't be a policy of 5% every year. If you're lucky, it might be 1%, while average inflation is more like 2%.

For another, the main reason for that meddling is that early CPI standards sucked.

For a third, one party has repeatedly tried to increase the minimum wage, while the other party has blocked it. So saying that it "hasn't been meddled with for a long time" is not really accurate. It's more accurate to say that attempts to change it have been hard to achieve, despite a clear need.

And that's going to be true for a fixed percentage policy, too. It will either be too little, in which case we'll be right back in the same spot in a few years, or it will be too much, in which case you'll see hyperinflation and people will be screaming about the price of eggs.

By contrast, an "increases by CPI-W' policy that doesn't change is going to be fairly reasonable even if nobody touches it, because that will automatically adjust as the economy expands and contracts, without the need for someone to adjust that fixed percentage.

And yeah, people might argue over whether the metric should be adjusted, and that will be a political football, but it will at least be a somewhat plausible approximation of real-world cost of living, whereas it currently is not, and a fixed percentage could massively undershoot in some years, and therefore wouldn't be a plausible approximation of reality, either.

Don't worry. He isn't going to change the words of the Our Father to "Give us this day our daily chicken."

No, it isn't. A standard library fee would be a fee that everyone pays, period. This is a fee on *commerce* that Apple had no meaningful role in.

None of Apple's software is designed specifically to provide support for running third-party applications other than the store app itself and the in-app purchasing support libraries. If you're using Apple's in-app purchases, Apple provides those libraries, the store app, the server infrastructure, and the payment processing infrastructure. But if you're using a third-party payment system, Apple provides none of that except for the store app itself (which is used only to download the app in the first place.

As long as Apple does not allow third-party app stores, it cannot reasonably compel developers to pay fees for app distribution, because that's an attempt to monopolize the app sales market.

Apple also provides the Xcode toolchain, but again, Apple's policies prohibit making apps available that are built using any other toolchain (to compel developers to develop on Mac hardware, which is itself likely an antitrust law violation, but I digress). Once again, under any reasonable interpretation of antitrust law, a company with Apple's market power has no real right to charge for something if they don't allow an alternative.

So the only thing remaining that Apple provides to those developers is the base operating system and libraries. And *users* pay for that as part of purchasing the device. Apple even amortizes the purchase price over several years to pay for the cost of ongoing operating system development. And by that same standard, developers have already paid for it by buying iOS devices to use for development.

In other words, Apple does nothing specific to earn that 27% other than throwing up artificial barriers to coerce developers into paying the fees, which makes those fees rent seeking in the strictest, purest sense.

You're right on this part. Charging 30% for every non-physical-item sale that occurs on your platform is extortionate. But as long as there are alternatives, nobody should care. But when they either compel developers to use their purchasing platform or charge nearly all of that fee for doing business on the platform even for developers who don't use their purchasing platform, it becomes an antitrust issue. And the legal systems in both the EU and the U.S. agree that this is an antitrust concern.

No, it doesn't. With that approach, the fees get paid only by developers that earn revenue through sales, not by developers who earn revenue through advertising. Apple's high fees are the main reason why gaming on iOS sucks. Their rules encourage folks to use massive amounts of advertising to earn revenue and design apps around driving people to watch more ads, rather than selling the games for a few bucks.

With that approach, developers who don't charge money leech off of the infrastructure without paying a penny. So again, not all developers are equal, only all developers who sell things.

Moreover, it is unenforceable. No company is going to give Apple access to its books. So it becomes a pinkie swear situation, where Apple relies on the companies to be honest.

And as previously noted, there's no good reason to allow Apple to charge *ANY* money for purchases that occur on the platform. Again, Apple does nothing to earn that revenue. It is pure rent-seeking market distortion, and as a dominant player in the market, that doesn't pass antitrust scrutiny. It never did.

But the biggest problem is that it unlawfully distorts the free market for a lot of other things, effectively using Apple's market power in an attempt to monopolize other industries.

As I've mentioned previously, Amazon takes only a 30% commission on most eBook sales. By taking a 30% commission on in-app purchases, Apple made it much harder for Amazon's Kindle content store to compete with Apple's iBooks store, because Amazon had to either literally give away content without earning a penny on it or do what they actually did — disable all purchasing on iOS and hope that users figure out how to buy content ahead of time on the Amazon website.

Spotify also had the same problem. Giving up 30% of their subscription revenue to Apple would have meant that Apple had almost half again more money to spend on content acquisition, which gave Apple Music an unfair competitive advantage. And the alternative — disabling purchasing subscriptions on iOS and hoping that uses figure out how to buy a subscription on the website — gives Apple an unfair competitive advantage in terms of acquiring new customers.

So any scheme in which Apple takes almost a third of the purchase price of any digital content or subscription purchased on the platform is per se an antitrust concern, because Apple's share of the market is so large, their users are so loyal, the barrier to switching platforms is so high, and their users have so much higher an average annual income than other platforms. And it will not stop being an antitrust concern unless the DOJ breaks up Apple and forces them to spin off Apple Music and iBooks into separate companies.

And the Apple Arcade service is an attempt to get ahead of subscription gaming and monopolize that future market in the same way.

All of these outcomes are generally unlawful. Besides being tantamount to an illegal tying agreement, they also represent per se price fixing. This isn't solvable by making minor changes to the business model. The business model Apple chose has always been a per se antitrust law violation. The fact that they got away with it for so long is remarkable, but it was never okay. It's not even close.

Ah, but charging a commission equal to the difference between a typical payment processor and their own processing fee is per se dissuading you from using a competitor with an anticompetitive method.

Oh, never mind. I understand what you meant now. You meant *retroactively* to extract revenue that was lost during the period when Apple was banned from collecting the fees. No, that would be illegal unless they put something into the user agreement now that says that they can do this if the court rules in their favor.

And even if they did, the courts will likely take a dim view of that practice, as it effectively means about 800,000 companies and app authors could have to put a large chunk of their revenue into escrow in case Apple demands it at some arbitrary point in the future.

Apple is freaking out because all the companies it was illegally manipulating through their App Store rules are now adding external payment systems, and suddenly Kindle is able to better compete against iBooks and Spotify is better able to compete against Apple Music. Apple is probably now losing a crapton of revenue that they were previously getting only because of what amounts to an illegal price fixing scheme that forced their competitors to charge a 30% premium on their subscriptions and content purchases while Apple probably paid only about 1–3% in credit card transaction fees.

So the "irreparable harm" to Apple is mostly in the form of losing ill-gotten revenue that the DOJ would have nailed them to the wall for long ago, were the DOJ not almost completely toothless on antitrust law over the last couple of decades.

Again, this request for an injunction should be soundly rejected, because it is transparently obvious that Apple is in a panic solely because their illegal price fixing scheme is coming crashing down, and now they have to actually compete fairly, and they don't know how to do that.

Yeah. The correct answer from the judge should be, "No. Fuck you. You've been criminally overcharging consumers by taking extortionate app store fees for seventeen years while preventing competition on your platform in a severely market-distorting way. Someone finally had the brass cojones to sue you and won. You can appeal all you want to, but your odds of success on appeal are nowhere near good enough to warrant injunctive relief, because what you did is so egregious."

Umm... according to the summary of the last Slashdot article, that's actually exactly what Apple tried to do, and they lied and said that they hadn't decided how much that fee should be, when in fact, they had already done so, and had specifically chosen the number to be so high that it effectively eliminated any benefit to the company from doing external payments. Their decision to play that game is, in fact, why the judge is holding them in contempt.

*shrugs*

We just have different goals. In my view, the owner of a device should have absolute authority over what software runs on that device. I view corporations locking down devices that people pay for to be inherently abusive to the free market and to consumers in general. You apparently do not.

To be clear, I'm not talking about every platform that exists — only platforms where the manufacturer of the device has an app store that sells third-party apps. So your car, which operates only using software authored by GM or whatever, would be unaffected, but if they start an app store to sell third party apps that run in their car, they should not be allowed to prevent third-party app stores.

And yes, I have thought through the ramifications of this quite extensively. I can see no obvious downsides. The moment a platform manufacturer decides to commercialize the platform by selling third-party apps themselves, they have to provide equal access for other distribution channels. They don't have to provide any support for it; they merely must not take technical measures to prevent it, or to the extent that they take technical measures to prevent arbitrary code execution for security purposes, a mechanism must exist whereby the legitimate owner of the device can add additional code signing authorities to the set of additional trust anchor certs (trusted root certs) to allow chains of trust provided by third-party stores.

I *might* be tempted to go farther and not limit this to devices that sell third-party apps, and extend it to all devices that are sold to consumers. The ability to, for example, run alternative firmware on Wi-Fi routers is a huge win, and likely this would be true for other devices (e.g. printers), were they not locked down. However, with such legislative changes, it is often useful to slowly boil the frog to allow the tech world to adapt, lest unexpected consequences occur from forcing those sorts of widespread changes too quickly, not to mention from poorly written legislation authored by people who don't understand how technology works. :-)

That said, feel free to provide actual reasons why you disagree with me. Ad hominem attacks won't earn you points around here.