SAN FRANCISCO — The worm appears to have turned. In the week that Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s top competition cop, launched a market abuse investigation into Apple, David Cicilline, the congressman leading a Big Tech probe in America, accused his country’s biggest company of “highway robbery” over the 30 per cent cut it takes from the cash generated by its App Store.
The number of ways that Apple can retaliate are so varied and hard to verify that no one is willing to publicly breathe a word against the company For clues, look no further than Lina Khan, a 31-year-old lawyer who helped set in motion the reckoning three years ago. While a law student, Khan wrote an article for The Yale Law Journal titled Amazon’s Anti-trust Paradox. She argued that the legal conventions that had held since the 1970s had been lapped by the Big Tech platforms.
To wit, a recent Wall Street Journal investigation found that the US$1.3 trillion giant mined data from third-party sellers to create rival products, contradicting its own stated policies. The revolution was subtle, done not through the creation of a new body or dissolution of another, but by a shift in interpretation. It was embraced by politicians and the courts, setting the stage for the mega-mergers of the 1980s and a gradual consolidation of power across industries, including the internet.
Last Monday, David Heinemeier Hansson launched a $99-a-year email service, called Hey. When his company, Basecamp, attempted to put an update through the App Store to fix a small bug, Apple said no. Unless Hey required users to sign up for the paid service though the App Store — rather than Hey’s website — it could not update the app. For Apple, it was no small matter.