I didn’t blog about it at the time but last week Apple announced that it was going to sting a bunch of European publishers for a cut of their profits. In short, Apple is demanding that if these publishers want to continue publishing into iPad apps, the subscriptions have to go through iTunes so that Apple can cream their traditional 30% off the top.

Not surprisingly, the publishers are none too happy about this. Neither, it turns out, are the Belgian authorities and competition minister Vincent van Quickborne has launched a “rapid” competition investigation into the issue.

In the article linked to, above, Andrew Orlowski makes a very valid point:

But the publishers have only themselves to blame – by failing to develop a common industry “news stand” payment platform. This would have made paying for stuff much easier, and lowered transaction costs for all concerned.

And this is exactly why News Corp’s Project Alesia was created – with the intention of licensing it to all comers on equitable terms. But the print industry didn’t have the brains to join in. The 100-man project was dismantled last autumn.

As a result publishers now have a choice of getting reamed by Apple, reamed by Amazon or (perhaps) getting reamed by Google.

As long as people rely on proprietary standards they will continue to be at the the mercy of whoever owns those standards. And if a proprietary standard becomes dominant, the temptation will always exist for the owner of that standard to engage in monopolistic practices.

Open standards – that is, standards that are publicly available and free (gratis) to use – avoid this. Open standards can be used and implemented by anyone and, because of this, they ensure that you are not vulnerable to the price gouging activity of a single company.