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I am only aware of one business model that both charges a percentage of the sale price of an item or service and (I am pretty sure) also states that you cannot sell the item or service for less if another method is used to pay for it.
I owned a small business for a short time and I used to get many offers for a service to allow me to take credit cards. All of these charged a small percentage of each credit card transaction for the privilege of taking the credit card for payment. This percentage was between 2 and 5 percent. I am also fairly certain that part of the agreement is that you cannot charge more for using a credit card than other forms of payment (cash for instance). The difference between this and apple, of course, is that apple is talking about forcing in app purchases to be an option for any paid content and any business can choose not to take credit cards as payment.
For those that like analogies consider the following:
1. The app store is a mall - there are allot of flaws with this part of the analogy, but for now it will do
2. Apps that provide a way to buy content are store fronts in the app store mall.
3. In app purchases are an alternate form of payment.
What Apple wants to do is say that if you have a store in our mall, you have to offer the ability to use a service we will provide to purchase items in said store. If the customer chooses to use this service, it will cost you 30% of the purchase price. You cannot offer the exact same items for less when another form of payment is used even if the the item is not bought through the store front in the mall.
An analogy to the way this has been working is:
1. The app store is a consignment shop - Apple does not set the prices for the items in the app store, it just collects a commission for allowing others to use their store to sell the items.
2. The apps that let you purchase other items are more like free magazines you see at the supermarket (here in the USA anyway) that have house listings, rental listings, etc.
3. In app purchases are an alternate form of payment. - This is actually a very good analogy for in app purchases since this is exactly what is happening.
So, currently the consignment shop has these magazines available to attract more people to come and look at the items for sale. What apple is proposing is, instead of charging the people who want to put the magazine out at Apples store a fee for the space they are using, forcing them to offer an option for the customer to pay the store instead of sending their payment directly to the person selling the item in the magazine. At this point Apple pays the person selling the item, minus 30%. Can you imagine the store where there is a free real estate magazine collecting a percentage of the purchase price of real estate sold by having the customer pay them instead?
Now, this would be illegal (at least here in the USA) if there were not viable alternative (for instance, Android devices). However, since there is, Apple would likely get away with it from a legal standpoint. Also, I agree that the vast majority of companies (especially publicly traded ones) would do the same kinds of things if they thought they could get away with it. So I hope it does not happen but the app store is more like a consignment shop than a mall and in app purchases are more like an alternate form of payment.
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