Rotten Apple and EU Competition Law

Shock, outrage, and convulsion among the techno-sheeps: Apple pulls Siri AI from the EU. Well, iOs 16's App Intent framework is highly problematic. Apple is wrong. The European Commission is right.

Apple is, technologically speaking, one colossal scam. It always has been.

Steve Jobs quite literally stole the concept of the mouse and graphical user interface after glimpsing a prototype during a visit to Xerox PARC, the R&D center of Rank Xerox. MacOS? It’s nothing more than a dressed-up version of UNIX (open source) built on a foundation called “Darwin.”

iOS — the operating system powering iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and the rest of the shiny menagerie — is equally Unix-based, except Apple has buried it under such a mountain of restrictions that it functions as a fully proprietary, locked-down system designed for one purpose above all else: total control. Control over app certification, control over app distribution, control over you.

How convenient. What a racket. Developers get to pay through the nose for access to the development toolkit, the APIs, and the privilege of selling their apps — apps that must, naturally, be signed with an Apple certificate. And Apple, ever the gracious host, helps itself to a tidy commission on every app sale. The device you handed over your hard-earned cash for? It’s yours in name only. You can’t actually do what you want with it.

Google pulled the exact same trick with Android — a Linux distribution dressed up with proprietary add-ons courtesy of the Palo Alto giant. The key difference, at least, is that Android remains open source, which curtails some abuses — as we’ll examine further on in this article.

The latest drama in this ongoing saga: Apple’s decision to withhold its AI Siri features from iOS in the EU. That’s not about the EU’s Digital Market Act. That’s about over 25 years of anti-trust and competition case law, on both sides of the Atlantic.