This nonsense has been parroted so often by now there should be a name for it.
And I'll be happy to prove you wrong: there are many things that Apple could do but hasn't done yet that would make them money and yet nobody is suing them for that. For instance they could make the cut 35% or 50% and if they don't then shareholders would sue. But they won't.
To everything you can find exceptions, no one's arguing what you're claiming. And you have to read between the lines here, a board doesn't have to remove a CEO for a decision, what I'm trying to point out is the CEO knows their job, and the board knows their job. Just like there's things you know if you do you won't get a good pay raise or bonus (or gasp, get fired), the CEO knows how to avoid that in the long term. The board also knows what they must do over the long term to keep their nice board seat. No one has to get sued to get the message.
I’m not claiming CEOs are legally required to chase every conceivable revenue dollar or that they’d lose a lawsuit if they don’t. Corporate law doesn’t work that way, and no serious person thinks it does.
What does exist is a well-understood governance and incentive regime: boards evaluate CEOs on long-term shareholder value, compensation is tied to financial performance, and strategic restraint has to be justified in those terms. That doesn’t require lawsuits, and it doesn’t require explicit mandates. It’s how large public companies are run.
The fact that Apple could charge 50% and chooses not to doesn’t refute this — it just shows that extraction is constrained by regulation, backlash, and platform risk. But once those constraints weaken, dominant platforms reliably increase extraction. That’s an empirical pattern, not a legal theory.
No one has to get sued because nobody will get sued and if they were sued they would win the suit.
https://www.legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-co...
I’m not sure we’re actually disagreeing. Boards are expected to maximize long-term shareholder value, not mechanically maximize short-term revenue at every opportunity. Sometimes that means pushing harder on extraction; other times it means holding back because of regulatory risk, developer backlash, or brand damage.
The claim isn’t that Apple must raise fees to 35% or be sued—clearly that’s not how fiduciary duty works. The claim is that, over time, dominant platforms tend to increase extraction once they’ve locked in users and developers. That pattern has been observed repeatedly, and it’s what people are pointing to when they talk about “enshittification.” Individual fee levels can vary, but the long-term direction for monopoly or duopoly platforms is fairly consistent.