I'm still amazed at Apple's 30%, it's just so brazenly high (like: "fuck you, we're Apple, we do what we want and you'll lick it up"). Unfortunately, too, other companies follow Apple's lead, and so this massive rent seeking percentage has become normalised.

I can totally agree that Apple sucks for doing this, but you seem to insinuate they started this. As always Apple wasn’t first not even tenth: Nintendo, Steam, Xbox, Kindle all did it prior to “the platform economy” 3)

I mean, the problem isn’t the rent seeking. It’s the licking it up part.