crowley

lkrupp said:

 If they are using loopholes it’s the same politicians wanting to tax them more that created the loopholes in the first place. So enough with the ‘tax avoidance’ bullshit.  If they weren’t legally avoiding those taxes then you might have a case. Getting the politicians to close the loopholes is the big problem. The politicians don’t WANT to close the loopholes because the threat to do so gives them the leverage they need to enrich themselves while in office. It’s all a scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours symbiotic relationship between the wealthy and the politicians.

AppleZulu said:

crowley said:

Beats said:

crowley said:

The security argument is a decent one, but Apple invite ridicule when they also wield the App Store rules as a competitive weapon and use it as a profit base.  It's a clear conflict of interest, claiming to be guardians of customers' privacy and security, but with the caveat that all their purchases get a slice delivered to Apple, and Apple get to set all of the content rules according to whim and fancy.

Developers would be much more sympathetic to the security argument if Apple hadn't arbitrarily acted like dicks so many times over the past several years and made so money from their developer tax.

Geez the replies just get dumber as I go through the pages.

”developer tax”??
So any profit a company makes is a “tax”?

What about the 30% Nintendo “developer tax”? Sony 30% “developer tax”? Wal-Mart, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Target, Samsung, TCL, Roku, Microsoft, Netflix, Disney…

…oh wait, it’s only a “tax” when Apple makes money.

No, I'd describe all of those similarly.  They aren't playing the victim though.

Without Apple providing the platform, developers would have no customers. Oh, wait. That’s not true.  Developers have customers on all those other platforms. Let’s correct that. 

Without Apple providing the platform, developers would have no Apple customers. So this argument is entirely about developers getting access to Apple’s customers, isn’t it? Why would they care about that if they can reach people on all those other platforms? There must be something special about those Apple customers. As it turns out, Apple’s customers are documented to be more willing to spend a buck on apps and services delivered through those apps. There are probably a couple of reasons for that. One, Apple doesn’t build cheap hardware, so iOS customers probably skew to higher incomes. Two - and this is important - Apple customers buy those devices in no small part because of their reputation as more stable, more secure, and more protective of the customers’ privacy. Both one and two above are true because Apple spends money to build better devices and to pair those with integrated operating systems that are designed to be more reliable, secure, and protective of customers’ privacy. 

So why is it again that Apple should provide all that to developers free of charge? You could argue a chicken-and-egg case that the apps are actually what deliver customers to the platform, except the App Store has been around for only a dozen years or so, and it has clearly delivered the entire mobile app market to the developers, since Android didn’t exist before iPhone and the software publishing market was fundamentally changed with the introduction of the App Store. So we actually do know which came first.

So Apple invented the mobile app paradigm, and, by producing high-quality hardware and integrated operating systems, curates the most lucrative customer segment of the mobile market. Yet, some developers think it’s an injustice that they’re not provided access to all of that, free of charge. As it turns out, I was right with the first sentence. Without Apple creating the platform, developers would have no customers.

Wait. Who is playing victim in this scenario?

Beats said:

crowley said:

The security argument is a decent one, but Apple invite ridicule when they also wield the App Store rules as a competitive weapon and use it as a profit base.  It's a clear conflict of interest, claiming to be guardians of customers' privacy and security, but with the caveat that all their purchases get a slice delivered to Apple, and Apple get to set all of the content rules according to whim and fancy.

Developers would be much more sympathetic to the security argument if Apple hadn't arbitrarily acted like dicks so many times over the past several years and made so money from their developer tax.

Geez the replies just get dumber as I go through the pages.

”developer tax”??
So any profit a company makes is a “tax”?

What about the 30% Nintendo “developer tax”? Sony 30% “developer tax”? Wal-Mart, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Target, Samsung, TCL, Roku, Microsoft, Netflix, Disney…

…oh wait, it’s only a “tax” when Apple makes money.

mariowinco said:

crowley said:

beowulfschmidt said:

Anyone who thinks any large corporation affected by this doesn't already have plans to move to yet another tax haven, outside the EU (pronounced "ewww!"), I have some waterfront property in Arizona I'd like you to look at.  Lots of sandy beach...

The point is that it doesn't matter.  If a company wants to incorporate in a tax haven but operate in a country where this principle is in action then they'll need to surrender global accounts and pay the difference to 15% on the local apportionment to the operating country.  It's a global tax rule applied locally, and it's countries that have seem their tax systems being abused for far too long finally biting back.  They're not competing with tax havens, they're making tax havens irrelevant.

Tax heavens will not be irrelevant soon. And Ireland is not the only “conduit” country in Europe: Switzerland, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and UK / Guernsey by example are also part of the elaborate tax elusion schemas today available for the corporations/rich.