It’s been a tough time for Apple. Just a few weeks ago CEO Tim Cook witness under oath that the app store policy of his company – including the air high tax that gives Apple 30% of all in-app purchases – were fair game, just to be slaughter with an anti-trust suit from EU authorities less than a day later. Yesterday was the company beat with another suit, this time from gaming behemoth at Epic, on the grounds that Apple is punishing them honestly for trying to circumvent Apple’s mandatory cutbacks.
Now Facebook is joining the fray.
Earlier today, the company rolled out a toolkit to let page owners in eligible countries—Meaning of publishers, artists, small businesses of all shapes and sizes – keep paid events on their Facebook page. And unlike a particular rival (* cough * Apple * cough *), they will not take a cut of money from one page owner. At least, not yet.
In a statement, Fiji Simo, the company VP that controls Facebook’s titular app, said that in order to “support small businesses and creators, Facebook will not pay any fees from paid online events for the next year.” If someone wanted to, say, attend an event hosted by one of their local restaurants or bars, they could pay through their web browser – or if they have an Android phone and live in a country where Facebook Pay’s is rolled out, a user could also pay with it. In any of these cases, the company behind this page will keep all profits made from these individual payments. (If we’ll take Facebook for her word.)
At Apple, well, things work a little differently, according to Simo.
“We are asking Apple to reduce its 30% App Store tax or allow us to offer Facebook Pay so that we can absorb all costs for companies struggling during COVID-19,” she said. writes. “Unfortunately, they have both our requests and [small/medium businesses] only 70% of their hard earned income will be paid. ”
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(Butensils of any size would get its 70% change only because Apple’s tax does not really discriminate here, and Facebook has not defined what it considers to be a “big business” and if these are subject to different conditions. It’s ait’s worth noting that an app and a live event are not the same thing, and probably should not be equated in the form of a product announcement.)
And just to really underline how much Apple adopts Do small business here, Facebook made a helpful note on their iOS checkout page, just to remind you that yes, Apple takes 30% of the hard earned money you donate to keep your favorite little biz on the floor. According to Simo, Facebook submitted the image below directly to Apple today to see if they approve it – but they are still waiting to return.
Somehow this looks a lot like Facebook double-dog that Apple dares to launch its app in the same way that Epic did less than 24 hours ago.
Unlike smaller companies – such as the encrypted messenger Telegram as the paid email service Hee—Canebooks never get behind Apple for its anti-competitive practices, probably because it looks hypocritical when it’s accused of holding a equally tight chokehold about the developers it works with. That said, Apple has not given it that its Big Tech chum has the same latitude. At last year’s WWDC conference, Apple took over direct shot by Facebook’s spotty track record with consumer privacy by marking themselves as a “antisocial network”That you could trust, unlike those other guys (* cough * Facebook * cough *). That, along with the company’s other privacy-centric ad campaigns, could be charged as enough of an attack against Facebook that a volley in the other direction (at least in this writer’s opinion) might be a little fair.
And somehow, presenting Apple as the enemy of small businesses around the world is a bad move on the part of Facebook, strategically speaking. For years, Facebooks painted themselves as champion of small businesses; When the coronavirus struck, that PR campaign hit overdrive. The company exclaimed roughly $ 100 million in monetary amounts and advertising credits for the untold number of mom-and-pop stores perhaps wrestling out of the pandemic’s financial wrath.
And while the company may help legitimate little biz here in the short term, it’s always with underlying message that it, now, comes from Facebook. Remember Facebook? The platform that appealed to genocide abroad, leaves conservative misinformation behind distribution like wildfire, and is not afraid of hat with the environment to lay a bed of fiberglass cables over the ocean floor. Facebook can invite millions to small businesses when they need it most, but we can not forget how it made those millions in the first place.
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