This is not true. Here you can watch someone set up the fingerprint without the protection and using a different finger to unlock it after the protection:
The valuation is from Softbank consistently buying rounds of equity at higher and higher valuations that they themselves were creating.
Softbank bought in, so this is more valuable, so Softbank will buy in again at a higher valuation, so this is more valuable, so Softbank will buy in again at a higher valuation; and round and round it went until we hit ~$40B
"Generally speaking, Softbank’s model is to manipulate private capital markets as a way of drowning out competitors with cash. For instance, there were several ‘rounds’ of WeWork investment where Softbank was buying more shares at higher valuations. WeWork ostensibly became more valuable because Son said it was more valuable, and bought shares for higher prices. And since there was no public market for these shares, the pricing of the shares was totally arbitrary. WeWork then used this cash to underprice competitors in the co-working space market, hoping to be able to profit later once it had a strong market position in real estate subletting or ancillary businesses.
Engaging in such a strategy used to be illegal, and was known as predatory pricing. There are laws, like Robinson-Patman and the Clayton Act, which, if read properly and enforced, prohibit such conduct. The reason is very basic to capitalism. Capitalism works because companies that thrive take a bunch of inputs and create a product that is more valuable than the sum of its parts. That creates additional value, and in such a model companies have to compete by making better goods and services.
What predatory pricing does is to enable competition purely based on access to capital. Someone like Neumann, and Son’s entire model with his Vision Fund, is to take inputs, combine them into products worth less than their cost, and plug up the deficit through the capital markets in hopes of acquiring market power later or of just self-dealing so the losses are placed onto someone else."
right, but their own app doesn't have the same restrictions. They can advertise the premium offering within the iOS app, they don;t need users to go further down a rabbit hole to find the premium offering.
I guess the crutch of Spotify's argument is that 30% is too high to charge while having their own competing app that isn't required to pay the same fees. Effectively using their unilateral control of the App Store and IAP to squeeze a third party competitor
Isn't their argument about the Apple Store and being able to put their product into the Apple Ecosystem? I didn't read any of it as saying they have a monopoly on phones.
