Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing

What Apple are trying to do is to make back the CapEx of developing the OS frameworks developers are relying upon. Those frameworks often make up a non-negligible fraction of an app's USP, i.e. they're partly why the developer is making money.

Apple see whatever slice of market value their OS frameworks added to the developer's product, as morally being their money. Whether there's a legal/contractual framework in place to grab that money or not, they feel like they should be pursuing it.

Compare and contrast: music producers sampling some other IP-holder's work. You'd expect, as a producer, that if half of your song was just sampled from another particular song, then 50% of the revenue of your song would be morally owed to the IP-holder of the other song.

And also, if you had a contract with the IP-holder that paid less than 50% out to them, that'd certainly be legal, but you'd also likely feel that it'd be you getting one up on them — you'd be coming away with more margin than you "deserve", and them with less than they "deserve", given the amount of work each of you put into the final product.

Apple thinks that they "deserve" 10–30% of the value App Store apps capture, because they do 10–30% of the work in making every App Store app (in advance, by building frameworks.) It's not about how the app wants to capture that value, any more than income taxes are about how you make money. They're both about the fact that you did make the money, and the 'infrastructural substrate' that 'invested' in you to help you make that money, wants what it sees as its implicit preferred-shareholder-dividend for that 'investment'.

(1) Which government? Governments have limited jurisdictions, so, e.g., the U.S. federal government, or the State of Michigan, is going to have a hard time prosecuting a Russian citizen in Russia.

(2) Under what laws? There are a lot of things that are malware that aren’t strictly illegal, at least not yet. Laws like this aren’t easy to write, either. They almost surely need to include the element of intent, which will make them hard to use.

(3) What agency (in each country) is going to be given the responsibility *and budget* to enforce the anti-malware laws (once they exist)? You’re proposing the creating of a fairly large new bureaucracy for most places.

(4) For good reason, the justice system in most places moves slowly. Presumably, malware apps will need to be left up at least until the criminal investigation is complete and a court order can be obtained. Possibly until a guilty verdict.

It seems so much more efficient to put in some up-front barriers to malware stores.

I’ll also just point out that we have had malware problems for some time and the threat of criminal prosecution does not seem to have proven to be a deterrent, so I don’t think we can count on it now.

I have a question: in USA could Tesla force Tesla Powerwall owners to only buy electricity from Tesla approved suppliers and when they sell their product through Tesla store, Tesla gets a 30% cut?