Happy Nice Mall

Thousands of people selling goods on Etsy this week The company goes on strike to protest climbing wages. And what seems like a fight for a small corner of the internet is indeed one of the most enduring battles on our digital world.

Etsy is one of the millions of internet companies that have something to sell and bring them together who might want to take advantage of the offer. These brokers charge a fee of 15 to 30 percent of each sale for their role as a link between the two parties. (Etsy charges a lot less.)

Technicians call this marketplace and they’re everywhere. Most of Amazon’s e-commerce sales come from the company’s fees from independent merchants where we find and purchase cat toys and phone chargers on Amazon. Apple’s app store, Airbnb, restaurant delivery apps, and Uber are marketplaces that match customers with people who offer apps, rental homes, restaurant meals, or rides to the airport.

A constant of the digital world is that Agents are hated by the people and businesses that trust them.. Almost always, at least some application developers, restaurantsEtsy dog ​​portrait creators, Substack newsletter authors and other marketplace vendors believe the fees are too high, the rules are unfair, they are being mistreated, or all of the above.

It is possible that these conflicts are inevitable. Running your own business in 2022 is almost always tech agents that make your work possible, but also difficult.

Look, in this Etsy dispute – as with Apple developers – I want to acknowledge that. anger at the company and Amazon merchants unhappiness in selling in the vast digital mall – both sides have meaning.

It’s undeniable that Etsy, Amazon, and Apple do a lot of work for people selling products through them. Without Etsy, people who make dog portraits would have to set up their own websites or stores and try to search for clients on their own and deal with tasks like credit card processing and providing customer service.

Etsy does all this for them for a fee that rises from 5 cents to 6.5 cents per dollar of sale. Merchants fighting Etsy also have other disagreements with the company; It alone effectively penalizes business owners if they fail to respond promptly to potential customers, and Google, Pinterest, and Facebook are further gnawing at the company’s revenue to advertise their products from vendors.

Etsy has I said He said some of the company’s approaches may not be popular right now, but will benefit vendors in the long run.

Sometimes these grievances may sound grouchy or abstract to us, but put yourself in the shoes of those Etsy sellers, restaurants that sell food through the Grubhub app, or businesses that make apps for iPhones.

They like to be able to find a group of customers in one place, but may resent the fact that Etsy, Grubhub, and Apple dictate so much how they run their business, taking a large chunk of their money and being more powerful than their business.

These conflicts are reflected in the price we pay and pose great risks to millions of people trying to make a living doing what they love.

A question that is always asked about disputes about marketplaces is: what is fair wage To charge people who offer Uber rides or sell dog portraits. But I also wonder if the creative tech industry is creative enough to look for alternative ways to make money.

Almost all marketplaces charge a commission and often other fees when we buy something. even in the metaverseIt looks like companies will still make money by collecting commissions from people selling virtual reality doodads. Is there another way and would it be better?

A few years ago, an investment analyst at Goldman Sachs suggested that instead of fighting developers resentful of paying up to 30 percent on digital gun sales in an iPhone game, Apple could somehow recoup its costs to support the app economy. different way. Analyst Rod Hall suggested that developers pay for some or all of the Apple technologies they use to create and distribute iPhone apps.

This approach will certainly create a whole new set of problems. And it doesn’t address complaints from iPhone developers or protesting Etsy sellers who like to have one central place to sell their stuff, but hates that these marketplaces have so much power over how they run their business.

There’s no magic balm for the internet’s ongoing fights against brokers like Apple and Etsy. But I appreciated Hall’s attempt to reimagine how marketplaces generate revenue. It feels like we could do more experiments to try to bring peace to one of the internet’s most enduring conflicts.

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Before you go …

• Ukraine said it had stopped a Russian cyberattack attempt on the country’s power grid. My colleague Kate Conger writes that the disclosure of the sophisticated cyberattack raises new concerns for the Russian government. May increase the use of digital weapons in Ukraine and potentially in the United States.

  Related: Russia’s technology industry thousands of workers experience a brain drain as they leave the country. And Vice, Twitch video streamers in Ukraine Bringing footage of the war to Russian audiences.

• These are the highest-paid people in the United States: According to the latest news of ProPublica reporting Tech billionaires, including Bill Gates and WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, made up the 10 of the 15 top revenue earners from 2013 to 2018, according to data from the Internal Revenue Service. Because of the design of the US tax system, tech billionaires tend to pay rates well. under other extremely wealthy people.

• Bribery to work in the office: My colleagues have a fun article advantages offered by technology companies to workers – including a Lizzo concert, window seats for all, free fried chicken and terrarium making lessons – to take them back to an office.

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