Melville House Books

Long-simmering outrage over Apple‘s heavy-handed censoring of, and extortionate fees for, iPad and iPhone app content seems to have exploded in the wake of the company’s announcement last week (see the earlier MobyLives report) that it was demanding an additional 30% fee for content sold through apps.

Now, according to a Wall Street Journal report, “U.S. antitrust enforcers have begun looking at the terms Apple Inc. set [last] week for media companies who want to sell their content on its popular iPad and other devices …. The Justice Department and the FTC are both interested in examining whether Apple is running afoul of U.S. antitrust laws by funneling media companies’ customers into the payment system for its iTunes store—and taking a 30% cut, the people familiar with the situation said.”

And a Reuters wire story reports, “In Europe, a European Commission spokeswoman said, ‘We are monitoring market developments carefully.’”

As if that weren’t bad enough, tech and financial analysts are saying Apple’s tactics are a huge blunder that aren’t going to work anyway. For example, in a blunt commentary on his blog, Forrester Research CEO George Colony writes, “Apple is blowing it. It risks replaying the PC wars of the early 1980s when Microsoft welcomed everyone into their development world while Apple stayed ‘pure’ and scared away its allies…. This time around, Apple’s hostile position could result in a 2014 App Internet market that looks something like this: 80% Android, 10% Apple, 10% Other.” Colony says “ultimate fees from content providers to app platform players should be in the 5% range — a long way from Apple’s 30%.”

Meanwhile the reports seem to have unleashed a flood of angry commentaries over the weekend from around the world, raising complaints against not just the new fees but the company’s other dictatorial tendencies that seemed relevant, such as this column from the Guardian by Dan Sabbagh:

There are other questions about Apple’s dominance. Apple has made it hard for some content creators to get their work on to its App Store. For example, the American satirical cartoonist Mark Fiore found his work rejected because “it ridicules public figures”. He only got on to the App Store last year after winning a Pulitzer Prize and a mini-media outcry. Not everybody, though, can do that to get past Apple’s move into content censorship.

Another column, in Australian MacWorld, said “it should be obvious to anyone that the poisonous effects of Apple’s actions reach far beyond the newspaper industry and the iOS ecosystem.”

And back here in the States, Gizmodo wasted no subtlety on the subject in its column, headlined, “Apple’s New Subscription Model is Evil.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.