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FEATURE
DMA and Apple
Apple "complies" with Europe's new law
Issue: 22.2 (March/April 2024)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 22,125
Starting Page Number: 54
Article Number: 22006
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Excerpt of article text...
There's a line commonly used on the entrepreneur reality competition
Shark Tank where one of the investors will say, "It's better to have one percent of a watermelon than ten percent of a grape."This is referring to percentage of ownership and is used in negotiations, the theory being that if a shark invests in your company, it will grow so much bigger that even if your share is less, you'll still have more on a net basis.
There's a great deal of truth in this. On their own, the entrepreneur can't grow nearly as big and certainly not as fast. There are benefits to partnering with a shark even if it means giving up shares of your company.
I can't help but think of this situation when I look at the Digital Marketplace Act (DMA), the new rules passed in the European Union, which, let's be frank, target Apple. (See the "What is the DMA?" sidebar in this article if you'd like more details about the new law.) Essentially, Europe is pissed off that they have no huge tech companies to rival those from the United States and their solution to "equalize" the playing field is with regulation.
Companies like Spotify, Match, and Epic—and many smaller developers—decry the "Apple Tax," the fees Apple charges for selling software on its platform. I get this. No one likes a middleman and sharing revenue, whether that's 30% or 3%, is galling. These app developers also don't like the control Apple has over its platform.
I'd be the first to admit that Apple has made many mistakes about how it has run its App Store. There have been bugs, problems with app review, inconsistent policies, and strange decisions from the get-go in 2008. However, one thing almost everyone is forgetting is what the world was like
before the App Store.
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