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Dear Ruben Safir,

Imagine your local farmers market: every Saturday the whole town
comes together to purchase fresh and homemade goods, enjoy the
entertainment, and find that there is always something for
everyone. Whatever you need, you can find it here, and anyone can
sign up to have their own little stand. It is a wonderful place,
or so it seems. Now, imagine starting out as a pumpkin farmer,
and you want to sell your pumpkins at this market. The market
owner asks 30% of every pumpkin that you sell. It's steep, but
the market owner -- we'll call him Mr. Apple -- owns all the
markets in your area, so you have little choice.

Let's continue this analogy and imagine that, since it is a
little hard for you to make ends meet, you decide to tell your
customers that they can come visit you at your farm to purchase
pumpkins. Mr. Apple overhears and shuts your stand down. You
explain that your business cannot be profitable this way, but the
grumpy market owner says that you can either comply or find
another place. At the end of your rope, you look for information
about starting your own farmers market, but it seems Mr. Apple
owns every building in town.

In the midst of Apple announcing its new products, attention is
drawn away from its ongoing battle to maintain its subjugation
over users globally. The Netherlands’ Authority for Consumers
and Markets (ACM) last month informed the U.S. technology
giant of its decision that the rules around the in-app payment
system are anticompetitive, making it the first antitrust
regulator to conclude that the company has abused market power in
the App Store. And while Apple is appealing this verdict, the
European Union is charging the company with another antitrust
claim concerning the App Store.

Globally, about 17% of all mobile phone users have an iPhone, but
Apple products and the iOS operating system are more popular in
the West, which has a substantial effect on those numbers. To
illustrate, in March 2021, 47% of all smartphone users in
the United States were iPhone users. Apple holds 56.7% of the
United States mobile operating system market share, and in Europe
this is 30% (increased from almost 27% last year). It will come
as no surprise that Google Play and the Apple App Store are the
two main distributors of mobile apps globally. These numbers
illustrate further what our pumpkin farmer experiences: You
either play the game, follow the rules, and pay the fees
arbitrarily determined by Apple, or you lose access to your
potential customers. However, you can install a 3rd party
application market on Android phones. One of them, called
F-Droid, is one that exclusively distributes free software.

As the judge in the recent Epic Games v Apple lawsuit in
the United States stated in her nearly 200 page court
opinion, "not every business is entitled to have access to what
is effectively shelf space if they cannot afford to pay a
commission to the platform host." The positions of Apple or
Google are hard to fight, because both organizations are
extremely powerful and they are financially able to protect this
power. Another reason is that court and governments globally lack
in-house technical expertise, they have to rely on
so-called "experts," who have immense influence on the
verdict. But most importantly, legislation on issues pertaining
to technology is so far behind that legal conclusions are
difficult to draw, and mostly appealed.

Why is it so hard to show that Apple is in the wrong here? Epic
Games v Apple sheds some light on this. To prove Apple was
monopolizing the market, it had to be established first what
market Apple would have this monopoly in. Apple has a hand in
many different markets. To name a few, the mobile phone market,
iOS apps, and the bigger gaming market. In this instance, it was
settled that the market was mobile game payments. In the
aforementioned case in the Netherlands, the focus was reduced to
primarily dating market apps.

These results affect the verdict greatly, "Epic claimed
Apple had abused a monopoly on the iOS app ecosystem; Apple
claimed Fortnite was playing in the more competitive overall
digital game market." The conclusion bypasses Apple's control
over users of mobile phones and the App Store any iOS user is
controlled by, because Apple does not have a monopoly in mobile
gaming... yet.

Epic Games may have failed to demonstrate conclusively the
monopolist position of Apple when it comes to mobile game
payments, but according to Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the
United States District Court for the Northern District of
California, "Apple’s anti-steering provisions hide critical
information from consumers and illegally stifle consumer
choice. When coupled with Apple’s incipient antitrust violations,
these anti-steering provisions are anticompetitive and a
nationwide remedy to eliminate those provisions is warranted."
This is a small victory for developers who would be allowed to
link to other in-app purchases and could potentially bypass
Apple's cut. The case of Epic Games v Apple is interesting
because it shakes the position of Apple, but let's not forget
that Epic Games itself has no intention for its users to be any
more free than Apple.

Nothing may come of this particular case either, as it will be
held up in appeals for the coming years, but countries all
over the world have come to realize that the position Apple has
ascribed itself violates people's rights, developer or
otherwise. In addition to the new charges from the European
Committee, a parallel initiative to the Epic Games v Apple
court ruling in the US is the Open App Markets Act, proposed
by Senators Amy Klobuchar, Richard Blumenthal, and Marsha
Blackburn, which would place a variety of restrictions on major
app marketplaces in order to protect competition. On August 31,
South Korea passed new regulations requiring Apple to accept
alternate payments in their respective app stores. Apple has made
other concessions in recent months as well, including
allowing "reader apps," any app that requires a subscription to
use, to direct users to their own Web sites for
payments. That specific guideline change came in response to
a probe by Japan's Fair Trade Commission.

People, developers, and governments around the world are
beginning to rise against Apple's powerful and restrictive
position. According to a timeline The Verge put
together, "Apple has had to change more App Store policies
between August 26, 2021 to September 10, than in any other period
in its history." Apple is fighting to hold its grip on the App
Store, because it increasingly delivers a large percentage of its
annual profits at an immense margin. Apple (and Google)
often cite safety and keeping users secure from malicious
software as the main reasons why they should have the
unbridled right to control how and which software is distributed
to millions of users, and often also the main reason for imposing
Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), but at a margin estimated
at nearly 72%, you would think that they can afford to protect
users and their freedom.

Threatening danger, fraud, or malware, are all clever and often
used ways of scaring users into agreeing to ever more restricting
user terms and conditions. The cost of developing ways to keep
users safe is not about finances, but power. Besides limiting
developers financially, they can also not distribute free
software via Apple. Again, under the guise of "protection,"
Apple's App Store only allows technologically restricted
software. And make no mistake, despite misleading advertising,
there is also no freedom for users in the way Apple runs
its App Store. We must remember that having freedom is
not "insecure," rather, it is a precondition for true
privacy. Without access to source code, we can never verify
privacy, or safety on Apple's devices.

Every security claim about the benefits of vetting installable
software is actually an argument for a world where the user can
choose which security vetting entity to trust. This world
requires free software. You can think of this as the monopoly
Apple has -- a monopoly on who gets to decide what software is
installable and usable on iOS devices. There are no significant
competitors because Apple threatens them with legal action, and
takes extreme technical measures to stop users from trying them
out.

Instead of trying to maintain the status quo one court case after
the other, it is time to evolve, Apple, move forward with
freedom, not against it. As one of the most successful and
richest companies in the world, we can not let it tell us that
absolute control over our user freedom is a justifiable price to
pay to make sure its technology is up to par. Users deserve the
freedom to decide what programs they want to install and run on
their devices. Developers deserve a market place where they can
distribute their work. Apple is trying to hold on to the power
they currently have, but we have to rally for change.

If we do, Apple will have no choice but to stop trying to hold
users hostage on its platforms. But we also need to keep our eyes
on the goal. Just because some parties are fighting to take power
away from Apple, we cannot sit back and let power transfer from
one proprietary organization to another. Governments need to take
measures and proper legislation needs to be established, not to
assure financial gain for anyone, but for free software
developers to distribute and fund their work, and, and for the
freedom for users to control our own devices, to install and to
run the software we choose.

Zoë Kooyman

Program Manager