I mean (as the court did) intermediary between apple and the consumer.
Which you yourself have shown is illusory :)
Apple's claim is in large part that the transaction is not between them and the consumer, but they are basically just off to the side somewhere. Again, in historical precedent like Illinois Brick, that is most certainly correct, and you can bet money the app store was structured in precisely the way it was to try to fall under that precedent.
However, that illusion of being off to the side is clearly false from a practical perspective, as you have shown, and in the end, that is what lost them the case.
Apple took the precedent to the logical extreme, and when you do that, you run the risk of the supreme court saying "yeah, actually, that goes against what we were trying to accomplish in the first place be". Which they did here: in the abstract, they actually say "yeah, we get it, but that that makes no sense in practice".
(Hopefully lyft/uber/etc are paying attention, because they seem to expect the courts to let them take their "we're just app makers" argument to the logical extreme in a different legal context)
Apple's claim is in large part that the transaction is not between them and the consumer, but they are basically just off to the side somewhere. Again, in historical precedent like Illinois Brick, that is most certainly correct, and you can bet money the app store was structured in precisely the way it was to try to fall under that precedent.
However, that illusion of being off to the side is clearly false from a practical perspective, as you have shown, and in the end, that is what lost them the case.
Apple took the precedent to the logical extreme, and when you do that, you run the risk of the supreme court saying "yeah, actually, that goes against what we were trying to accomplish in the first place be". Which they did here: in the abstract, they actually say "yeah, we get it, but that that makes no sense in practice".
(Hopefully lyft/uber/etc are paying attention, because they seem to expect the courts to let them take their "we're just app makers" argument to the logical extreme in a different legal context)