By Dan Moren
April 11, 2024 8:56 AM PT
Want Apple to change? Regulation works.
Lately you can’t throw a digital camera without hitting a story on the various regulatory and legal challenges Apple’s been facing. While some have decried these actions as interference in the internal operations of a company, there’s one salient detail that I think those opinions often overlook.
Regulation works.
Here are just a handful of examples from the past few months of Apple changing its policies due to regulations—or, in some cases, the mere threat of regulation:
- In January, Apple announced that it would now allow developers of game streaming apps to submit a single app containing the entire game catalog. That had previously been a sticking point for Microsoft bringing Xbox Game Pass to the platform in 2020—and, as we later found out, was one of the areas of concern in the antitrust lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice just a couple months later.
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Late last week, Apple changed another of its longstanding App Store rules by allowing “retro game console emulator apps”. Interestingly, one of the only other announced third-party marketplaces coming to the EU is AltStore, the marquee title in which will be Delta, a Nintendo emulator developed by AltStore proprietor Riley Testut.
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Just today, Apple announced that it would it relax rules around used parts for repairing iPhones. Apple’s Self Service Repair program, which was put into place to comply with Right to Repair legislation passed in some states, launched in 2021. But critics pointed out that Apple’s initial foray still required a restrictive “parts pairing” process that made third-party repairs more limited and more expensive, and Oregon recently made a law that bans the approach. Today’s change effectively undoes that process, though it does still include provisions to prevent stolen parts from being used.
None of this even takes into account the massive changes made to iOS as the result of the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which may already be resulting in consumer changes.
Apple is unquestionably a behemoth in the technology industry, one of a handful that dominate our lives. And while there are places that those companies butt up against each other and compete, it’s also apparent that corporations of this size are not subject to the same degrees of competition that much smaller players might be. Their core businesses are relatively stable, even if they skirmish around the edges: Apple and Amazon can, for example, squabble over the (relatively small) market of smart home speakers, but Apple’s no more likely to come up with a killer retail site that unseats Amazon than Amazon is to make a world-class smartphone.1
More to the point, these handful of tech companies are so large that the chances of being upset, or even threatened, by small upstarts is vanishingly small. (And in the rare cases where it might happen, it’s a simple matter for the large companies to simply acquire the smaller ones.)
That means the only entities powerful enough to impose any sort of pushback against the companies are government bodies.2 Apple details this in its annual 10-K filing, which lays out risk factors to the company’s business. One entire heading in that section is “Legal and Regulatory Compliance Risks”, which includes the follow sub-heading:
The Company is subject to complex and changing laws and regulations worldwide, which exposes the Company to potential liabilities, increased costs and other adverse effects on the Company’s business.
The simple fact is that, without some sort of threat, Apple was never going to change any of its business practices, because there was absolutely no reason to do so. Apple would happily have never offered a self-service repair program or allowed emulators or changed its policies about game streaming—we know because there were literally years of people asking for these changes without the company lifting a finger—until governments got involved.
It’s not just Apple, either. Broadband companies weren’t about to start giving customers clearer and more accessible information about their plans without regulatory intervention from the FCC.
The absence of meaningful challenges breeds complacency. And complacency leads to the temptation to collect increasing revenue without corresponding innovation because, well, it sure is a lot easier, isn’t?
Much as some might pooh-pooh government intervention in the market, these regulatory and legal threats are ultimately efficacious because Apple ended up changing its behavior. In some cases, it may take months or years for the impacts on the consumer to be felt—and, in some cases, as detractors point out, it may not happen at all if users decide they don’t want these capabilities or alternatives. And you know what? That’s totally fine—because then it’s users choosing to stick with the status quo, as opposed to having no other option than the one that they’re given.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
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