And the Walls Come Tumbling Down (Premium)

Last year, I described the overdue antitrust action against Big Tech as breathtaking. But that was when it was mostly EU-based. With the U.S. government suddenly coming down hard on Big Tech, everything is changing: If we know anything about this country, it’s that its citizens don’t understand the impact of bad behavior unless it hits them in the face. And now they can see for themselves the prison that Big Tech has erected around them.

Thanks to Apple’s blistering slap down in Epic v. Apple, brought on by its belligerent and anticompetitive behavior, the consumer electronics giant was forced to do what it should have done all along and let app developers communicate with their own customers. And one of the things they can communicate, using the language of their choice, is a way for those customers to make purchases outside of the app. Outside the reach of Apple’s onerous 30 percent fees.

And they are doing so. We wrote about how Spotify immediately updated its app to support payments outside its iOS app. But they are not alone. The first I heard to make this change was Proton, which emailed me to tell me that it would immediately allow users on iPhones make purchases on their devices.

“In response to the recent court ruling in the US against Apple’s illegal in-app purchase monopoly, Proton will finally be allowed to let iOS users purchase subscriptions outside of the app store,” Proton CEO Andy Yen said. “No Apple tax means we will lower prices for users by up to 30 percent. Worth noting, this court ruling is one of the most effective way to cut inflation in the US, by dropping the price of a significant chunk of digital purchases by 30 percent overnight. Percentage wise, it’s bigger than the 10 percent tariffs [that the U.S. government] put in place last month.”

But there’s more. And Amazon is up there with Spotify from a reach perspective. We’ll see what happens with the core Amazon app, but the other day, Amazon quietly re-enabled e-book purchases in the Kindle app on iOS, a feature the app hasn’t had for–what?–over a decade. Now, there’s a “Get book” link that directs users seamlessly to the Amazon website where they can purchase e-books like human beings without any Apple Tax markup.

Get book. What a concept.

Even Apple’s biggest fans and supporters can’t justify Apple taking a cut of this type of digital purchase inside an app. Just as they could not justify its previous attempt to tax Microsoft per-game for game streaming inside its Xbox mobile app.

As so many have argued, including Microsoft, why is it OK for Netflix or whatever service to stream movies or music, but it’s not OK for Microsoft and others to stream games? Likewise, why is it OK for Walmart to see physical books from within its iOS app without paying the Apple Tax, but it’s not OK for Amazon to sell e-books from within its iOS app?

Simple. It’s anticompetitive behavior, illegal for a monopoly like Apple, aimed at keeping down companies that sell things that are a little too close to services that Apple offers. Apple has a game service called Apple Arcade that competes with Xbox Cloud Gaming on iPhone And Apple has an Apple Books service that sells e-books that competes with Amazon Kindle. This is classic anticompetitive behavior, and obvious. It’s indefensible.

Apple internally debated whether to even charge a fee on purchases made outside of iOS apps on iPhones after it was ordered to allow this in the original Epic v. Apple ruling, which you’ll recall many saw as an Apple “win.” But I described it as a mixed verdict because Epic had won on this one major point. Phil Schiller, by all accounts as pro-Apple as any human can be, argued against any fee, and he later admitted that the 27 percent fee structure it tried to impose on these purchases likely violated the court order. Which, of course, it did.

But the irony here is that Apple could have retained some ill-gotten and undeserved revenues if it had simply not been so terrible a company. Had Apple imposed a credit card processing-like fee of 2 or 3 percent on those purchases, still undeserved, then it’s unlikely any company would have complained and even less likely that Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers would have even considered sanctioning this company.

But no. Apple is that terrible.

Unable to justify its fee structure in court–it literally had no answer to the question of how it had determined the cost because it was literally made up and then never revisited–Apple executives hemmed, hawed, and then lied. And then CEO Time Cook simply did the worst thing he could do, choosing “the most anticompetitive option at every turn.” Among other things, Apple made the external purchase fee structure so onerous that no developer would even consider using it.

That guy. So moral. So good.

In the 1980s, Steve Jobs was fond of saying of Apple, “Isn’t it funny, a ship that leaks from the top.” Today, there’s a similar saying that needs to get more play, and it’s not funny at all: Isn’t it sad, a company that rots from the top?

For Apple’s fans, this is a tough one. Ethically and legally, the company has been laid bare to be just as horrible as any other company in Big Tech, despite all the marketing around privacy, human decency, and diversity. Apple isn’t just for-profit, it’s for all the profit, it’s the most profitable and successful company on earth. You don’t get there by playing nice. And you can’t get there by being truly “good.” Apple’s a great company. But it’s not great. It has to be forced to do the right thing, ethically and legally. And that’s the type of thing we associate with the likes of Google and Meta, not Apple.

Maybe it’s time for a change: Even the greatest leaders in history would often outstay their welcome. I often reference General Douglas MacArthur, who played a crucial role in the U.S. victory against the Japanese in World War II but then wanted to nuke China during the Korean War. In the tech space, Bill Gates was central to Microsoft’s early rise and initial successes, but then he lost the script during the U.S. antitrust trial and has been trying to rehabilitate himself ever since. This is Tim Cook’s moment: He was crucial to saving Apple by moving its manufacturing to China, but now he’s taking a holier-than-thou stance on indefensible policies. He’s making Apple worse. Even Phil Schiller came out of this looking good by comparison. Think about that.

“To Apple’s biggest fans, I’ll just say this: Forget about individual abuses, or features, or whatever else,” I wrote last year. “All regulators are asking for, essentially, is for this company to live up to the lofty ideals that it promotes for itself. In that sense, we all want the same thing, for Apple to be as good as it says it is. Surely, you find it odd that the company is pushing back so hard, especially on those things that seem so trifling, like respecting choice in web browsers. This isn’t how an innocent, customer-focused company behaves. And if Microsoft’s history of belligerence in the face of regulation is any guide, and I think it is, this won’t end well for Apple or its customers.”

Put simply, Apple’s intent is nefarious and the result of its behavior is enshittification. It’s also anticompetitive and illegal, which Apple has now amplified by purposefully ignoring a court order.

But whatever. “Get book” is all you need to know. Because as a human being and, in this case, a reader, that’s all you really want. To get the book. And no amount of rationalization will ever make sense of Apple trying to take a cut of that.