>I'm generally supportive of Apple's right to a revenue share from apps which sit on the App Store shelf and/or rely on Apple libraries and APIs
This is nothing else but Apple imposing a tax. If Apple wants to pretend it is a nation state I think regulators of actual states should take notice and treat them like the peer competitor they intend to be.
Not even the Judge in Apple vs Epic agrees with this. For a very recent reminder of this, Virtual Legality today posted his observations[0] about the South Korea law and how the effect of it is being misreported in the media (and to be quite frank, by commenters in Hacker News). In here he reminds us about how people are improperly conflating the "right" and the "means" to collect a revenue share.
Not sure how that dismisses the claim. He argues that this is not a tax because Apple is not just a payment provider, but provides a marketplace? that's exactly what any state does with a tax, finance the commons. Except that in this case, Apple is staking out its own territory, competitors excluded, playing digital landlord.
Apple didn't merely "stake out" its own territory. It created its own territory where none previously existed. And being a landlord is a perfectly legal occupation, even if it doesn't win you many friends.
In my personal opinion (and I recognise that this is a controversial view on Hacker News) Apple should be entitled to the same thing Epic Games asks for—which is the right to decide how much their intellectual property is worth when used by other developers to build commercial products.
This is nothing else but Apple imposing a tax. If Apple wants to pretend it is a nation state I think regulators of actual states should take notice and treat them like the peer competitor they intend to be.