Apple

I saw something the other day about one of the companies that's a darling of the political left, despite it's actual business practices.   Yes, I'm talking about Apple.  I know they use slave labor to build their products, and that their products are built oversees because of the access to slave labor and the lack of environmental regulatoions.  But that's old, ignored news.  This is something I just saw recently.

I somehow was exposed to a young woman on Twitter with an absolutely compelling story of success.  She was the first person in her (immigrant) family to graduate from college, and was financially supporting her sick mother and brother who was going to college.   Laudable, right?

Well, upon investigation, I found out how she was doing so.  She was making (lots of) money by monetizing her sexuality on the internet.  She was using Patreon and OnlyFans to post "creative content" that was proving to be lucrative for her and her family.    Apparently she decided that those platforms charged too much of her income for their services, so she decided to start her own platform that would be more friendly to the content creators.   She came up with an alternative platform and it's been a success.  Their business model is that the platform (I can't recall the name right now) gets 10% of what people earn, and the creators get to keep 90%.   Again, this is all a great success story so for.

Enter Apple.   Apple announces that this platform needs to pay Apple 30% of all the revenues generated through the platform if they want to show up in the App Store.   Apparently it seems that Apple doesn't charge this 30% to OnlyFans and Patreon,  just to the upstart.   I understand that Apple has to get paid for their service, but 30% of revenue from a new platform, dedicated to allowing content creators to maximize their profit from their content seems excessive.  Seems like the kind of thing you'd see from a monopoly.  

It'll be interesting to see how it plays out, and I'm rooting for the "little guy" (really girl/woman) in this.  It'll be interesting to see if the political left continues it's love affair with Apple if this ends up becoming a bigger thing.

It's similar to something I heard last week.  Someone I know who's a professional musician (one of the hardest hit jobs by COVID) had managed to make a decent living over the last year by providing music to YouTube that users could access at little or no cost for their videos.  Unfortunately YouTube decided that they needed more diversity in their contributors and the white guy in his 40's got shut down.  Not because his music sucked, not because he didn't put out enough music to meet demand, not because he was difficult to deal with, just because he wasn't diverse enough.  

The reason I'm writing this is that I will almost always support people who come up against an obstacle that stops them from doing what they think is right when they take the responsibility on themselves to achieve their goals.    Whether I'm supporting some folks who think that the local public schools aren't liberal enough and want to start a charter school to be more liberal, or someone who's making money selling naked pictures of themselves on the internet,  they deserve to be able to succeed or fail without Big tech or Big government preventing them from doing so.