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...