Apple to Australians: You’re Too Stupid to Choose Your Own Apps

Apple has released a scaremongering, self-serving warning aimed at the Australian government, claiming that Australians will be overrun by a parade of digital horribles if Australia follows the European Union’s lead and regulates Apple’s “walled garden.” 

The EU’s Digital Markets Act is a big, complex, ambitious law that takes aim squarely at the source of Big Tech’s power: lock-in. For users, the DMA offers interoperability rules that let Europeans escape US tech giants’ walled gardens without giving up their relationships and digital memories.  

For small businesses, the DMA offers something just as valuable: the right to process their own payments. That may sound boring, but here’s the thing: Apple takes 30 percent commission on most payments made through iPhone and iPad apps, and they ban app makers from including alternative payment methods or even mentioning that Apple customers can make their payments on the web. 

All this means that every euro a European Patreon user sends to a performer or artist takes a round-trip through Cupertino, California, and comes back 30 cents lighter. Same goes for other money sent to major newspapers, big games, or large service providers. Meanwhile, the actual cost of processing a payment in the EU is less than one percent, meaning that Apple is taking in a 3,000 percent margin on its EU payments. 

To make things worse, Apple uses “digital rights management” to lock iPhones and iPads to its official App Store. That means that Europeans can’t escape Apple’s 30 percent “app tax” by installing apps from a store with fairer payment policies.  

Here, too, the DMA offers relief, with a rule that requires Apple to permit “sideloading” of apps (that is, installing apps without using an app store). The same rule requires Apple to allow its customers to choose to use independent app stores. 

With the DMA, the EU is leading the world in smart, administrable tech policies that strike at the power of tech companies. This is a welcome break from the dominant approach to tech policy over the first two decades of this century, in which regulators focused on demanding that tech companies use their power wisely – by surveilling and controlling their users to prevent bad behavior – rather than taking that power away. 

Which is why Australia is so interested. A late 2024 report from the Australian Treasury took a serious look at transposing DMA-style rules to Australia. It’s a sound policy, as the European experience has shown. 

But you wouldn’t know it by listening to Apple. According to Apple, Australians aren’t competent to have the final say over which apps they use and how they pay for them, and only Apple can make those determinations safely. It’s true that Apple sometimes takes bold, admirable steps to protect its customers’ privacy – but it’s also true that sometimes Apple invades its customers’ privacy (and lies about it). It’s true that sometimes Apple defends its customers from government spying – but it’s also true that sometimes Apple serves its customers up on a platter to government spies, delivering population-scale surveillance for autocratic regimes (and Apple has even been known to change its apps to help autocrats cling to power). 

Apple sometimes has its customers’ backs, but often, it sides with its shareholders (or repressive governments) over those customers. There’s no such thing as a benevolent dictator: letting Apple veto your decisions about how you use your devices will not make you safer. 

Apple’s claims about the chaos and dangers that Europeans face thanks to the DMA are even more (grimly) funny when you consider that Apple has flouted EU law with breathtaking acts of malicious compliance. Apparently, the European iPhone carnage has been triggered by the words on the European law books, without Apple even having to follow those laws! 

The world is in the midst of a global anti-monopoly wave that keeps on growing. This decade has seen big, muscular antitrust action in the US, the UK, the EU, Canada, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Spain, France, and even China.  

It’s been a century since the last wave of trustbusting swept the globe, and while today’s monopolists are orders of magnitude larger than their early 20th-century forbears, they also have a unique vulnerability.  

Broadly speaking, today’s tech giants cheat in the same way everywhere. They do the same spying, the same price-gouging, and employ the same lock-in tactics in every country where they operate, which is practically every country. That means that when a large bloc like the EU makes a good tech regulation, it has the power to ripple out across the planet, benefiting all of us – like when the EU forced Apple to switch to standard USB-C cables to charge their devices, and we all got iPhones with USB-C ports. 

It makes perfect sense for Australia to import the DMA – after all, Apple and other American tech companies run the same scams on Australians as they do on Europeans. 

Around the world, antitrust enforcers have figured out that they can copy one another’s homework, to the benefit of the people they defend. For example, in 2022, the UK’s Digital Markets Unit published a landmark study on the abuses of the mobile duopoly. The EU Commission relied on the UK report when it crafted the DMA, as did an American Congressman who introduced a similar law that year. The same report’s findings became the basis for new enforcement efforts in Japan and South Korea. 

As Benjamin Franklin wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine.” It’s wonderful to see Australian regulators picking up best practices from the EU, and we look forward to seeing what ideas Australia has for the rest of the world to copy.