Comment by danielmarkbruce
2 years ago
Sorry, that was a joke. I should have lathered on more obvious sarcasm. The DOJ don't understand very basic computer security. It's disgraceful. Agree with everything you say here - the antitrust regulators seem to have forgotten who they are supposed to be protecting - consumers, not apple competitors.
Ok, but about the percentage fee?
If Apple removed the transaction cost entirely, then there wouldn't be much complaint.
That absolutely raises prices and effects consumers.
If Apple takes a 0% fee, or allows other competitors some way of charging 0%, that would obviously benefit consumers.
The fee is paid by card issuers. It's 0.15% for cc and 0.5 pennies for debit cards. Card issuers take a large chunk of change in interchange fees, this is a tiny, tiny proportion of it. Even if they managed to pass the cost on (which they almost certainly cannot given the nature of that business), spread across it might be 0.00000x % increase in costs. And, it's quite likely to actually reduce costs for card issuers due to reduced fraud and reduced physical card issuance (those cards actually cost money to produce).
> t's 0.15% for cc and 0.5 pennies for debit cards.
So in other words, it's not 0%. Apple takes a cut.
Instead, it should be 0%.
That's how consumers would benefit. If it were 0%.
> The fee is paid by card issuers
This is a point addressed by any introductory economics class in high school.
It's called tax incidence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence
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I question the governments decision to include this in the complaint. Surely Visa's 2-3% fee has a greater impact on the wider economy than Apple's 0.15%.
Visa's take isn't anything like that, it's close to 0.10%. The vast majority of that fat fee you refer to goes to the bank who issued the card.