Apple's rhetoric regarding DMA fines is wilfully deceitful and intentionally misleading. Let's look at the depths Cupertino will plumb to defend *extremely* predatory behaviour.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm248vzg9jwo
The BBC quotes Apple repeating lines that it often trots out whenever anyone points out that its rent-extracting behaviour via the App Store is monopolistic and predatory:
`... Apple saying it was being "unfairly targeted" and forced to "give away our technology for free."`
Literally every part of this is facially incorrect. To qualify for intervention under the DMA (the law being used here), Apple needed to meet objective criteria for market significance:
https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en
Google's Android and Play store are similarly situated and *also* covered under the DMA's gatekeeper designations, a process that Apple briefed the EC on in what can only be described as shockingly bad faith:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/apple_ipados_dma_gatekeeper/
Apple plays the same games everywhere, assuming that regulators will either not understand that they are acting disingenuously, or that Apple's bleating about how objective and rational criteria are somehow "unfair" will undermine their own credibility in front of those enforcers.
Case in point, remember how Safari is actually 3+ different browsers? Pepperidge Farm -- and regulators around the world -- remembers:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/apple_ipados_dma_gatekeeper/
Apple has been maximally aggressive in their campaign against even the most common sense regulation, giving nothing and insulting the intelligence and even-handedness of even the most light-touch regulators. Remember the shameful episode in the Netherlands? Everyone in Brussels does:
https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/apple-fails-satisfy-requirements-set-acm
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-faces-more-fines-for-avoiding-dutch-app-store-ruling-2022-2
Everyone who has paid even fleeting attention now understands the game: Apple's trying to extract rents, rather than using the control it demands in the user's legitimate interests first and foremost.
Which brings us to the second lie: that the EC is trying to make "Apple give away its technology for free".
First, users paid for their phones. The idea that they shouldn't be allowed to load programs onto them -- in essence, digital serfdom -- has to clear a high bar, and Apple's arguments flop.
Apple claims deep security harms would befall users, but Apple also gives out API permissions to apps like candy, historically causing all sorts of harms that Apple had to be embarrassed into addressing. It now tries to rewrite that history as a chivalrous quest in which it lead the charge. But everyone understands that's not what happened:
And this is the other half of the "giving away our technology for free" lie: to access *anything* on an iPhone, developers *already* have to pay Apple, both for a Mac (a luxury computer by any standard), and for a developer account, as well as physical devices to test on.
But let's not beat around the bush: Apple would *absolutely* still have an iOS developer program even if it didn't charge developers the $99 cover charge. *Apple* benefits most from app availability.
And in the App Store cloak-and-dagger fight that has played out over the past 15 years, we've seen this over and over. Discovery in various lawsuits has shown that Apple's "store review" is a paper tiger *explicitly* because it wants (needs!) a large catalogue of relevant apps in the store to maintain the illusion that stores are good and normal. All the while loudly shouting to anyone who will listen how picky it is.
It's a farce, and doesn't pass a basic market economics smell test.
We can tell it's a farce because Apple took steps in the face of enforcement of the TikTok ban (which, it should be noted, remains the letter of the law in the US, which this administration is in clear breach of) to clearly blame the govt for the removal of a popular app. It wasn't the long-running abuses of in-app-browsers or APIs to invade privacy that did it...nope, it was the potential removal by law that caused Apple to step up *for TikTok* (in a deniable way):
So Apple has pushed every limit, told every half-truth, and stretched every claim to the breaking point. And it's still trying to do this, after abusing developers and end-users for more than a decade.
Of *course* the EU sees through it. And thank heavens for that.
Alex Russell
