And now we see it clear, like a Cupertino sunrise bathing Mt. Bielawski in amber: Apple will censor its App Store at the behest of the Trump administration without putting up a fight.

It will twist words into their antipodes to serve the powerful at the expense of the weak.

To better serve autocrats, it will talk out both sides of its mouth in ways it had previously reserved for dissembling arguments against threats to profits, like right-to-repair and browser choice.

They are, of course, linked.

Apple bent the knee for months, leaving many commentators to ask why. But the reasons are not mysterious: Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate. Namely, selective exemption from tariffs and an end to the spectre of pro-competition regulation that might bring about real browser choice.

Over the past few weeks, Tim Apple got a lot what he paid for,¹ with the full weight of the US foreign and industrial policy apparatus threatening the EU over DMA enforcement. This has been part of a full-court press from Cupertino. Apple simultaneously threatened the EU while rolling out fresh astroturf for pliant regulators to recline on. This is loud, coordinated, and calculated. But calculated to achieve what? Why is the DMA such a threat to Apple?

Interoperability.

The DMA holds the power to unlock true, safe, interoperability via the web. Its core terms require that Apple facilitate real browser engine choice, and Apple is all but refusing, playing games to prevent powerful and safe iOS browsers and the powerful web applications they facilitate. Web applications that can challenge the App Store.

Unlike tariffs, which present a threat to short-term profits through higher costs and suppression of upgrades in the near term, interoperability is a larger and more insidious boogeyman for Apple. It could change everything.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Web?

Apple's profits are less and less attributable to innovation as “services” revenue swells Cupertino's coffers out of all proportion to iPhone sales volume. “Services” is code for rent extraction from captive users and developers. If they could acquire and make safe apps outside the App Store, Apple wouldn't be able to take 30% from an outlandishly large fraction of the digital ecosystem's wealthiest players.

Apple understands browser choice is a threat to its rentier model. The DMA holds the potential for developers to finally access the safe, open, and interoperable web technologies that power most desktop computing today. This is a particular threat to Apple, because its class-leading hardware is perfectly suited to running web applications. All that's missing are browsers that aren't intentionally hobbled. This helps to explain why Apple simultaneously demands control over all browser technology on iOS while delaying important APIs, breaking foundational capabilities, and gaslighting developers about Apple's unwillingness to solve pressing problems.

Keeping capable, stable, high-quality browsers away from iOS is necessary to maintain the App Store's monopoly on the features every app needs. Keeping other software distribution mechanisms from offering those features at a lower price is a hard requirement for Cupertino's extractive business model. The web (in particular, PWAs) present a worst-case scenario.

Unlike alternative app stores that let developers decouple distribution of proprietary apps from Apple's App Store, PWAs further free developers from building for each OS separately, allowing them to deliver apps though a zero-cost cost platform that builds on standards. And that platform doesn't feature a single choke point. For small developers, this is transformative, and it's why late-stage Apple cannot abide laws that create commercial fairness and enable safe, secure, pro-user alternatives.

Dots Unconnected

This is what Apple is mortgaging its brand (or, if you prefer, soul) to prevent: a world where users have a real choice in browsers.

Horrors.

Apple is loaning its monopoly on iOS software to yet another authoritarian regime without a fight, painting a stark contrast: when profits are on the line, Cupertino will gaslight democratic regulators and defy pro-competition laws with all the $1600/hr lawyers Harvard can graduate. And when it needs a transactional authoritarian's help to protect those same profits, temporarily² lending its godlike power over iOS to censor clearly protected speech isn't too high a price to ask. Struggle for thee, but not for me.

The kicker is that the only alternative for affected users and developers is Apple's decrepit implementation of web apps; the same platform Cupertino serially knee-caps to deflect competition with its proprietary APIs.

It is no exaggeration to say the tech press is letting democracy down by failing to connect the dots. Why is Apple capitulating? Because Apple wants things from the government. What are those things? We should be deep into that debate, but our reportage and editorial classes cannot grasp that A precedes B. The obvious answers are also the right ones: selective protection from tariffs, defanged prosecution by the DOJ, and an umbrella from the EU's democratic, pro-competition regulation.

The Verge tiptoed ever so close to getting it, quoting letters that former Apple executives sent the company:³

I used to believe that Apple were unequivocally ‘the good guys,’” Hodges writes. “I passionately advocated for people to understand Apple as being on the side of its users above all else. I now feel like I must question that.”

— Wiley Hodges,
"The Verge"

This is a clue; a lead that a more thoughtful press and tech commentariat could use to evaluate the frames the parties deploy to their own benefit.

"Who should rule?"

The tech press is failing to grasp the moral stakes of API access. Again and again they flunk at connecting boring questions of who can write and distribute programs for phones to urgent issues of power over publication and control of devices. By declining to join these threads, they allow the unearned and increasingly indefensible power of mobile OS vendors to proliferate. The urgent question is how that power can be attenuated, or as Popper put it:

We must ask whether…we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to replace the question: "Who should rule?" by the new question: "How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?"

— Karl Popper,
"The Open Society and Its Enemies"

But the tech press does not ask these questions.

Instead of questioning why Apple's OS is so fundamentally insecure that an App Store is necessary, they accept the ever-false idea that iOS has been relatively secure because of the App Store.

Instead of confronting Apple with the reality that it used the App Store to hand out privacy-invading APIs in undisciplined ways to unscrupulous actors, it congratulates Cupertino on the next episode of our nightly kayfabe. The links between Apple's monopoly on sensitive APIs and the growth of monopolies in adjacent sectors are rarely, if ever, questioned. Far too often, the tech press accepts the narrative structure of Apple's marketing, satisfying pangs of journalistic conscience with largely ineffectual discussions about specific features that will not upset the power balance.

Nowhere, e.g., in The Verge's coverage of these letters is there a discussion about alternatives to the App Store. Only a few outlets ever press Apple on its suppression of web apps, including failure to add PWA install banners and essential capabilities. It's not an Apple vs. Google horse-race story, and so discussion of power distribution doesn't get coverage.

Settling for occasionally embarrassing Apple into partially reversing its most visibly egregious actions is ethically and morally stunted. Accepting the frame of "who should rule?" that Cupertino reflexively deploys is toxic to any hope of worthwhile technology because it creates and celebrates the idea of kings, leaving us supine relative to the mega-corps in our phones.

This is, in a word, childish.

Adults understand that things are complicated, that even the best intentioned folks get things wrong, or can go astray in larger ways. We build institutions and technologies to protect ourselves and those we love from the worst impacts of those events, and those institutions always model struggles over power and authority. If we are lucky and skilled enough to build well, the result are balanced systems that attenuate any attempts at imposing overt authoritarianism.

In other words, the exact opposite of Apple's infantilising and totalitarian world view.

Instead of debating which wealthy vassals might be more virtuous than the current rulers, we should instead focus on attenuating the power of these monarchical, centralising actors. The DMA is doing this, creating the conditions for interoperability, and through interoperability, competition. Apple know it, and that's why they're willing to pawn their own dignity, along with the rights of fellow Americans, to snuff out the threat.

These are not minor points. Apple has power, and that power comes from its effective monopoly on the APIs that make applications possible on the most important computing platform of our adult lives.

Protecting this power has become an end unto itself, curdling the pro-social narratives Apple takes pains to identify itself with. Any reporter that bothers to do what a scrappy band of web developers have done — to actually read the self-contradictory tosh Apple flings at regulators and legislators around the world — would have been better prepared for this moment. They would be able to pattern match; to see that twisting words to defend the indefensible isn't somehow alien to Apple. It's not even unusual.

But The Verge, 404, and even Wired are declining to connect the dots. If our luminaries can't or won't dig in, what hope do less thoughtful publications with wider audiences have?

Apple's power and profits have made it an enemy of democracy and civic rights at home and abroad. A mealy-mouthed tech press that cannot see or say the obvious is worse than useless; it is an ally in Apple's attempts to obfuscate.

The most important story about smartphones for at least the past decade has been Cupertino's suppression of the web, because that is a true threat to the App Store, and Apple's power flows from the monopolies it braids together. As Cory Doctorow observed:

Apple's story – the story of all centralized, authoritarian technology – is that you have to trade freedom for security. If you want technology that Just Works(TM), you need to give up on the idea of being able to override the manufacturer's decisions. It's always prix-fixe, never a la carte.

This is a kind of vulgar Thatcherism, a high-tech version of her maxim that "there is no alternative." Decomposing the iPhone into its constituent parts – thoughtful, well-tested technology; total control by a single vendor – is posed as a logical impossibility, like a demand for water that's not wet

— Cory Doctorow,
"Plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack)"

The Price of High Modernism is Dignity

Doctorow's piece on these outrages is a must-read, as it does what so many in the tech press fail to attempt: connecting patterns of behaviour over time and geography to make sense of Apple's capitulation. It also burrows into the rot at the heart of the App Store: the claim that anybody should have as much power as Apple has arrogated to itself.

We can see clearly now that this micro-authoritarian structure is easily swayed by macro-authoritarians, and bends easily to those demands. As James C. Scott wrote:

I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements. The first is the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society, an aspiration that we have already seen at work in scientific forestry, but one raised to a far more comprehensive and ambitious level. “High modernism” seems an appropriate term for this aspiration. As a faith, it was shared by many across a wide spectrum of political ideologies. Its main carriers and exponents were the avant-garde among engineers, planners, technocrats, high-level administrators, architects, scientists, and visionaries.

If one were to imagine a pantheon or Hall of Fame of high-modernist figures, it would almost certainly include such names as Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walther Rathenau, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Julius Nyerere. They envisioned a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.

— James C. Scott,
"Seeing Like A State"

This is also Apple's vision for the iPhone; an unshakeable belief in its own rightness and transformative power for good. Never mind all the folks that get hurt along the way, it is good because Apple does it. There is no claim more central to the mythos of Apple's marketing wing, and no deception more empowering to abusers of power.⁴

Apple claims to stand for open societies, but POSIWID shows that to be a lie. It is not just corrupted, but itself has become corrupting; a corrosive influence on the day-to-day exercise of rights necessary for democracy and the rule-of-law to thrive.⁵

Apple's Le Corbusierian addiction to control has not pushed it into an alliance with those resisting oppression, but into open revolt against efforts that would make the iPhone an asset for citizens exercising their legitimate rights to aid the powerless. It scuttles and undermines open technologies that would aid dissidents. It bends the knee to tyranny because unchecked power helps Cupertino stave off competition, preserving (it thinks) a space for its own messianic vision of technology to lift others out of perdition.

If the consequences were not so dire, it would be tragically funny.

Let's hope our tech press find their nerve, and a copy of “The Open Society and Its Enemies," before we lose the ability to laugh.

Endnote: Let's Talk About Google

I spent a dozen and change years at Google, and my greatest disappointment in leadership over those years was the way the founders coddled the Android team's similarly authoritarian vision.

For the price of a prominent search box on every phone,⁶ the senior leadership (including Sundar) were willing to sow the seeds of the web's obsolescence, handing untold power to Andy Rubin's team of Java zealots. It was no secret that they sought to displace the web as the primary way for users to experience computing, substituting proprietary APIs for open platforms along the way.

With the growth of Android, Play grew in influence, thanks growing revenue and a need to cover for Android's original sins.⁷ This led to a series of subtler, but no less effective, anti-web tactics that dovetailed with Apple's suppression of web apps on iOS. The back doors and exotic hoops developers must jump through to gain distribution for interoperable apps remains a scandal.

But more than talking about Google and what it has done, we should talk about how we talk about Google. In specific, how the lofty goals of its Search origins were undercut by those anti-social, anti-user failures in Android and Play.

It's no surprise that Google is playing disingenuous games around providing access to competitors regarding web apps on Android, while simultaneously pushing to expand its control over app distribution. The Play team covet what Apple have, and far from exhibiting any self-awareness of their own culpability, are content to squander whatever brand reputation Google may have left in order to expand its power over software distribution.

And nobody can claim that power is being used for good.

Google is not creating moral distance between itself and Apple, or seeking to help developers build PWAs to steer around the easily-censored channels it markets, and totally coincidentally, taxes.⁸ Google is Apple's collaborator in capitulation. A moral void, trotting out the same, tired tactic of hiding behind Apple's skirt whenever questions about the centralising and authoritarian tendencies of App Store monopolies crop up. For 15 years, Android has been content to pen 1-pagers for knock-off versions of whatever Apple shipped last year, including authoritarian-friendly acquiescence.

Play is now the primary software acquisition channel for most users around the world, and that should cause our tech press to intensify scrutiny of these actions, but that's not how Silicon Valley's wealth-pilled technorati think, talk, or write. The Bay Area's moral universe extends to the wall of the privilege bubble, and no further. We don't talk about the consequences of enshittified, trickle-down tech, or even bother to look hard at it. That would require using Android and…like…eww.

Far from brave truth-telling, the tech press we have today treats the tech the other half (80%) use as a curio; a destination to gawp at on safari, rather than a geography whose residents are just as worthy of dignity and respect as any other. And that's how Google is getting away with shocking acts of despicable cowardice to defend a parallel proprietary ecosystem of gambling, scams, and shocking privacy invasion, but with a fraction of the negative coverage.

And that's a scandal, too.

FOOTNOTES

1. Does anyone doubt that Tim Apple's wishlist didn't also include a slap-on-the-wrist conclusion to the US vs. Apple?

   And can anyone safely claim that, under an administration as nakedly corrupt as Donald Trump's, Apple couldn't buy off the DOJ? And what might the going rate for such policy pliability be?

   That we have to ask says everything. ⇐

2. It hopes. ⇐

3. I don't know Wiley Hodges, but the tone of his letter is everything I expect from Apple employees attempting to convince their (now ex-)bosses of anything: over-the-top praise combined with overt appeals to the brand as the thing of value. At times it verges on hagiography. Again, this is how I understand Apple to discuss Apple to Apple, not just the outside world. I have no doubt that this sort of sickly sweet presentation is absolutely necessary for even moderate criticism to be legible when directed up the chain. Autocracies are not given to debate, and Apple is nothing if not autocratic.

   His follow-up post is more open and honest, and that's commendable. You quickly grasp that he's struggling with some level of deprogramming now that he's on the outside and can only extend the benefit of the doubt towards FruitCo as far as the available evidence allows. Like the rest of us, he's discovering that Apple is demanding far more trust than its actions can justify. He's rightly disappointed that Apple isn't living up to the implications of its stated ideals, and that the stated justifications seem uncomfortably ad hoc, if not self-serving.

   This discomfort stems from the difference between principle and PR.

   Principles construct tests with which we must wrestle. Marketing creates frames that cast one party as an unambiguous hero. I've often joked that Apple is a marketing firm with an engineering side gig, and this is never more obvious than in the stark differences between communicated choices and revealed outcomes.

   No large western company exerts deeper control over its image, prying deep into the personal lives of its employees in domineering ways to protect its brand from (often legitimate) critique that might undermine the message of the day. Every Apple employeed not named "Tim" submits to an authoritarian regime all day, every day. It's no wonder that the demands of power come so easily to the firm. All of this is done to maintain the control that allows Marketing to cast Apple's image in a light that makes it the obvious answer to "who should rule?"

   But as we know, that question is itself the problem.

   Reading these posts, I really feel for the guy, and wish him luck in convincing Apple to change course. If (as seems likely) it does not, I would encourage him to re-read that same Human Rights Policy again and then ask: "is this document a statement of principle or is it marketing collateral?" ⇐

4. The cultish belief that "it is good because we do it" is first and foremost a self-deception. It's so much easier to project confidence in this preposterous proposition when the messenger themselves is a convert.

   The belief that "we should rule" is only possible to sustain among thoughtful people once the question "who should rule?" is deeply engrained. No wonder, then, that the firm works so dang hard to market its singular virtue to the internal, captive audience. ⇐

5. As I keep pointing out, Apple can make different choices. Apple could unblock competing browsers tomorrow. It could fully and adequately fund the Safari team tomorrow. It could implement basic features (like install banners) that would make web apps more viable tomorrow. These are small technical challenges that Apple has used disingenuous rhetoric to blow out of all proportion as it has tried to keep the web at bay. But if Apple wanted to be on the side of the angels, it could easily provide a viable alternative for developers who get edited out of the App Store. ⇐

6. Control over search entry points is the purest commercial analogue in Android to green/blue messages on iOS. Both work to dig moats around commodity services, erecting barriers to switching away from the OS's provider, and both have been fantastically successful in tamping down competition. ⇐

7. It will never cease to be a scandal that Android's singular success metric in the Andy Rubin years was “activations.” The idea that more handsets running Android was success is a direct parallel to Zuckian fantasies about “connection” as an unalloyed good.

   These are facially infantile metrics, but Google management allowed it to continue well past the sell-by date, with predictably horrendous consequences for user privacy and security. Play, and specifically the hot-potato of "GMS Core" (a.k.a., "Play Services") were tasked with covering for the perennially out of date OSes running on client devices. That situation is scarcely better today. At last check, the ecosystem remains desperately fragmented, with huge numbers of users on outdated and fundamentally insecure releases. Google has gone so far as to remove these statistics from its public documentation site to avoid the press asking uncomfortable questions. Insecurity in service of growth is Android's most lasting legacy.

   Like Apple, Andy Rubin saw the web as a threat to his growth ambitions, working to undermine it as a competitor at every step. Some day the full story of how PWAs came to be will be told, but suffice to say, Android's rabid acolytes within the company did everything they could to prevent them, and when that was no longer possible, to slow their spread. ⇐

8. Don't worry, though, Play doesn't tax developers as much as Apple. So Google are the good guys. Right?

   Right? ⇐