403 Forbidden
www.commondreams.org

The leading French economist Gabriel Zucman is urging European governments to inflict financial pain on American billionaires in response to US President Donald Trump’s effort to seize control of Greenland, a mineral-rich island that some of Trump’s rich campaign donors see as a potentially massive profit opportunity.

“Access to the European market—by billionaires and the companies they own—should be made conditional on paying a wealth tax: in effect, a tariff for oligarchs. If Elon Musk, for example, wants to keep selling Teslas in Europe, he should have to pay it. If he refuses, Tesla would lose access to the European market.”

  • r0ertel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    23 hours ago

    It’s a super long read, but filled with nuggets that explain exactly how to hit the rich by taking away their money. The TL;DR is to repeal the country’s anti-circumvention law then route the subscription money locally.

    The Post-American Internet (permalink)

    there’s a third possible response to tariffs, one that’s just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?

    It’s hard to convey how much money is on the table here. Take just one example: Apple’s App Store. Apple forces all app vendors into using its payment processor, and charges them a 30 percent commission on every euro spent inside of an app… … Apple makes $100 billion per year on it. If the EU repeals Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, some smart geeks in Finland could reverse-engineer Apple’s bootloaders and make a hardware dongle that jailbreaks phones so that they can use alternative app stores, and sell the dongle – along with the infrastructure to operate an app store – to anyone in the world who wants to go into business competing with Apple for users and app vendors.

    Those competitors could offer a 90% discount to every crafter on Etsy, every performer on Patreon, every online news outlet, every game dev, every media store. Offer them a 90% discount on payments, and still make $10b/year.

    • Mortoc@lemmy.worldEnglish
      61·
      22 hours ago

      I’m a game dev and I’d love to see nothing more than Apple getting slapped down for what they’ve done to mobile gaming, but this won’t work.

      Setting aside how hard bootstrapping a two-sided marketplace is, those of us that currently depend on Apple store placement and goodwill can’t risk pissing Apple off.

      • r0ertel@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        In the case of Apple, you’d host your stuff on whatever app store is the most popular in any given country. It’s sort of like F-Droid but for the normies.

        What’s really interesting is the thought of jailbreaking your own tractor, opening the possibility to local aftermarket parts. Again, this would take the money from John Deere and open up a local market.

        I am consistently disappointed when I hear politicians’ only recourse to anything is taxes. Remember how they were going to tax email to fix the spam problem?

      • bookmeat@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
        12·
        20 hours ago

        Don’t hide behind fear of change. Just because you can’t imagine a possible future without Apple doesn’t mean no one can and that it can’t be done.