Ben Brooks, with a contrarian view to the recent podcasting kerfuffle:

Apple has no financial reason to keep this going. If anything, the argument could be daftly made that they have financial incentive to nuke all their work in podcasts.

Apple allowed podcasters to charge for podcasts — and took their infamous 30% — now they have financial incentive to keep it going. Now they have incentive to promote podcasts. It’s not a win-win — you would likely lose some (if not all) of the decentralized and “open” nature of podcasting.

But is that not better than losing it all?

The only way to ensure that a company will continue developing a platform is if they derive value from it. Apple’s built and maintained a podcast directory and listening software for over a decade with zero financial incentive — that’s almost unheard of. Don’t get me wrong, I love podcasting the way it is, but I also loved the state of RSS when Google Reader was around. And we all know how that turned out.