Week in Insights: Processing Fees Blur Limits of Corporate Power

Curated by Daniel Xu

The way we perceive major corporations’ influence in our lives appears to have changed in recent years. A clear example is the language we use to describe the processing fees charged by technology companies for the use of their app stores.

The fees have commonly been referred to, quite matter-of-factly, as “taxes.” Taxes generally are enforced by a government, but now they appear to be imposed by technology companies and device manufacturers. As more of our economic lives are played out online, the term “tax” appears to be more than a semantic shift.

When ...