Well, I hope you pay your mom 30% of your income then because you got big on the back of her work.
Seriously though, how you get started is immaterial, you should be free to change service providers, especially service providers that are price gouging you when you feel that you can no longer justify their cut.
As for the tax avoidance (not evasion, that's an important distinction here), yes all the big guys do it, but that does not make it right and if Apple were to actually pay their taxes I would see that as them at least understanding the pain of having to pay a good chunk of your income every year.
I pay my taxes and contribute to my community through them, Apple siphons off a very large chunk of the worlds wealth into the pockets of a very small number of shareholders and now wants to argue that they have an unassailable claim to 30% of the income of other companies. And I strongly disagree with that.
If they charged between 1 and 5% for their service that would be fine by me, but it would still not give them an automatic right to this fee, they would have to compete with everybody else.
Anti competitive behavior has one clear and common thread running through it the world over: an element of abuse and that is clearly present here.
Unfortunately, my mom died a couple of years ago, so no I don't pay anything :)
I believe we have a fundamentally different world view, so I am not sure if it makes sense to continue debating.
I believe in meritocracy. Apple put hard, hard work into building an ecosystem of 1.8 bn active devices. I believe they are entitled to reap the benefits and not let any upstart compete with them as they wish.
If you believe in a meritocracy then you should see the irony in that you are defending a de-facto monopolist and their rent-seeking behavior, which is an abuse of power.
The rent seekers are the inheritors of a machine that they themselves did not build (the shareholders of Apple), and who are taking away a good chunk of income of those whose products people wish to use, a sure sign of merit.
> Apple put hard, hard work into building an ecosystem of 1.8 bn active devices. I believe they are entitled to reap the benefits and not let any upstart compete with them as they wish.
So you don't believe in meritocracy, you believe in perpetually inherited wealth.
Meritocracy would mean that, at any point in time, whoever is the best at doing something should rise to the top. Maintaining someone else's advantage because they were the best at some previous point in time actively works against a meritocracy.
This is like saying that nobility is a form of meritocracy, as Queen Elizabeth II's great great great grandmother put hard, hard work into building an empire, so she should now entitled to reap the benefits, not let some upstart president of a colony compete with her as they wish.
Seriously though, how you get started is immaterial, you should be free to change service providers, especially service providers that are price gouging you when you feel that you can no longer justify their cut.
As for the tax avoidance (not evasion, that's an important distinction here), yes all the big guys do it, but that does not make it right and if Apple were to actually pay their taxes I would see that as them at least understanding the pain of having to pay a good chunk of your income every year.
I pay my taxes and contribute to my community through them, Apple siphons off a very large chunk of the worlds wealth into the pockets of a very small number of shareholders and now wants to argue that they have an unassailable claim to 30% of the income of other companies. And I strongly disagree with that.
If they charged between 1 and 5% for their service that would be fine by me, but it would still not give them an automatic right to this fee, they would have to compete with everybody else.
Anti competitive behavior has one clear and common thread running through it the world over: an element of abuse and that is clearly present here.