Apple's App Store debate is a decade old. The EU's Digital Markets Act is forcing change anyway, and Apple's response satisfies almost no one. A US court ruling already narrowed Apple's anti-steering rule. A DoJ or FTC lawsuit may follow. Over a billion people use the iPhone as their primary computer. That scale is why regulators keep showing up, even as the tech industry has moved on to generative AI.
The core tension is not simple greed versus openness. Apple's sandboxed model was a genuine architectural choice: trade the PC's freedom to break things for security, privacy, and reliability at mass-market scale. That tradeoff produced the largest software ecosystem ever built, millions of apps and billions of downloads. But Apple runs a spectrum. Some restrictions are pure security. Others, like blocking NFC wallet access for Square or banning streaming game services, have no security rationale. A 2011 Steve Jobs email cited in the original makes this explicit: new rules introduced that year were designed to foreclose specific competitors.
The payment rules illustrate where the spectrum collapses into anticompetitive structure. Apple charges 30% on digital content, zero to Uber and TikTok, and caps its store at 10,000 products per app, making it technically unusable as an ebook store regardless of willingness to pay. Music and ebook margins cannot absorb 30%, so those sellers use their own subscriptions, but Apple banned them from telling users how to subscribe externally. The full piece works through why Apple's DMA compliance proposals fail on their own terms, and why it may be structurally impossible to build what the EU actually asked for.
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