In-App Purchase and Rent-Seeking
Chris Adamson on the news that news that “if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase”:
What Apple seeks to collect is rent, specifically monopoly rent, the ability to extract excess payments not as a consequence of a mutually-beneficial trade, but because it owns the damn store and it sets the damn rules.
Jason Snell has a good article exploring the possible consequences of this “announcement.”
