All you've got to do is maintain a little distance from them, and I can easily outrun an ant. Step on the closest 500, take a step back. Repeat forever.
I'm commenting under the impression that the guy was talking about the fact that the system is not federated, not that he was talking about physical hardware.
For what it's worth, I'm a senior developer who spent 8 years at Amazon partially working on developing and scaling systems that received millions of requests per day.
I can see an argument for owing something for hosting the app in the App Store, but certainly not 30% of what every user pays or whatever ridiculous amount Apple charges. Price it like hosting a file on S3, perhaps.
I suspect they invested in companies that sell VPNs.