People love it when you lose, They love Dirty Laundry - AntiTrust Megathread

Kisai · August 1, 2020

8 hours ago, RejZoR said:

In a way doing cuts on major players is the backwards logic. When you're a small developer, getting cut discounts would make sense. How can a small dev afford 30% cut and build anything worthwhile from that? Where on the other spectrum we have multi billion companies that earn ridiculous amounts of cash and on top of that they have to pay smaller cut from every sale. It's like encouraging corporations being even stronger and stifling startups and smaller companies from even entering the market.

The same way I couldn't understand this thing on Steam when Activision complained iirc. When you're small you're paying full cut, but when you're big, you're paying a discounted cut. Where on earth that makes sense? Smaller initial cut should be the encouragement to make your company big and when you're earning big money you can also pay bigger cuts.

It's a double edged sword.

In theory... the larger you are, the less you're supposed to pay because you're doing services in bulk, and thus you get access to bulk, less-red-tape, means of doing things. Like theoretically, an agreement between Apple and Amazon would zero-rate each other's costs to reduce the amount they pay to each other's billing processors. So if you buy something on Amazon via Apple's app or rent a movie via Amazon's app, Apple charges you via Apple pay, but internally has paid Amazon nothing, and kept the money. Likewise for movies rented on the theoretical AppleTV app on Amazon devices. So in volume, that means that the commissions Apple would have made and the commissions Amazon would have made against each other are zero-rated out, thus the expenses for tax purposes come out to less.

When you're a small company, you don't have that leverage, because it literately costs Apple more to service your payments, because they must be done one at a time and there is no reciprocal reason for Apple to buy from you.

Yet, and this is the big fat "IF". Ever since things went digital, the need for a "bulk" discount has gone away. It's not like you're getting a discount for buying a truck of onions and potatoes for your steak store. With perishables you kinda want to get rid of everything you made before it expires. Hence the logical discount for buying in bulk. But if something isn't perishable, then no discount ever needs to apply. It's not like the bits will rot if nobody buys 100,000 copies of something. So there is no reason to ever off bulk discounts for digital services except when a secondary API is invoked.

This secondary API, like with the amazon example, works directly against backend services and reduces the infrastructure needs of both companies where you would otherwise get harassed by the "are you human" captcha every minute. Basically , a permissive, automated API that you have to setup a formal, mutually beneficial business relationship to use.

soldier_ph · August 1, 2020

Not directly related but still: Have you ever wondered why Amazon doesn't really talk much about the physical locations of their Data Centers for the AWS ? Well turns out wikileaks has done some digging and found some Highly Confidential Documents and released them in this Article in 2018: https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/

mr moose · August 1, 2020

2 hours ago, Pascal... said:

Not directly related but still: Have you ever wondered why Amazon doesn't really talk much about the physical locations of their Data Centers for the AWS ? Well turns out wikileaks has done some digging and found some Highly Confidential Documents and released them in this Article in 2018: https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/

Nope, it makes perfect sense to obscure as much of it as possible and to separate your personal business from government business (especially national security and defense).