The EU had the same question when limiting credit card processing fees. They simply looked at what the costs were and how much profits those companies were reporting from that part of the business.

You can still make it much harder for them. Physically disabled the write pin on the UEFI flash memory chip, for example. Some vendors let you require a password to upgrade the firmware.

None of it is undefeatable, but you have to consider who you adversary is. If it's just the cops and their IT people, it probably won't take much to thwart them.

There are also more passive measures like making sure you have decent CCTV coverage, so they can't do easily sneak in.

We had a similar thing in the UK with the BBC. Conservatives decided that it wasn't helping them win, so destroyed it. The formerly excellent news service, that held politicians to account and kept the other news services at least a little bit honest, was gutted.

The country is far worse off for it, in ways that cannot easily, if ever, be undone.

Trump and his ilk are doing the same thing in the US.

You seem to be confusing "wanting to get rid of communists" with "wanting their countries to be poor and dangerous".

Patreon should have just immediately pulled their app from Apple's store. They're a website. There's no obvious benefit to doing things in an app versus a website.

That said, nothing inherently prevents Apple from maliciously making it harder for Patreon's website to work on iOS. Apple controls the only web browser engine that is allowed to run on the platform.

Actually, it is. Cars don't generally allow third-party apps at all. They're an embedded system. Therefore, those are entirely moot.

Gaming systems are largely limited to games, and to a limited extent, media consumption (e.g. Netflix), which makes them a much more specialized system than an iPhone.

And gaming systems don't need to be a single tool that serves all of a user's needs in the way that a cell phone does. Cell phones are something you carry with you all day, and generally require a monthly cell service contract. So there are significant ongoing costs and hassles associated with having more than one. But most people play games primarily at home, which means it is relatively painless (apart from the initial purchase cost) to have multiple consoles; if a game isn't available on one, they can play it on another. Thus, game console app sales compete across platforms in a way that cellular phone app sales largely do not.

So while not entirely moot, gaming platforms are still a very different animal from a consumer perspective.

Apple is the only high-volume general-purpose computing platform I can think of that does not freely allow side-loading and third-party app stores. So in many critical ways, Apple stands alone on this one. And that's doubly true if you limit it to mobile platforms.

That said, I do agree that game platforms should not be allowed to be locked down, either. It is just far less important from an antitrust perspective because of fundamental differences in how the devices are used.

U.S. courts could not give two s**ts about worldwide market share. Apple has more than 58% of U.S. market share for cellular phones.

Apple's servers aren't involved at all for in-app purchase payments through third party payment processors. And no sane person would consider such sandboxing to be reasonable for a server that just provides downloads of app binaries, because the server is not doing anything more than loading bytes from disk and sending them out over HTTPS. So that would get smacked down by the courts in a quarter of a second.

Competent lawyers do not play games like that, because they know that doing so is the surest way to incur treble damages for willful violation of court orders.

They, in fact, have 58% of the U.S. cellular phone market, which is more than enough control over the market to regulate them under antitrust law.

This. When Steve first introduced the App Store, he said they weren't trying to make a profit off of it. That was quickly proven to be a lie, because the economies of scale brought the costs way down, but the fees never decreased.

And the fact of the matter is that the decision to make apps go through the app review process is a decision made by Apple primarily for their benefit, not for the user's benefit. No other general-purpose platform (as opposed to game-only platforms like primitive cell phones and game consoles and iPod) ever did anything like that prior to Apple doing it, and it was never a security disaster.

Because the user has no choice about whether to buy apps from Apple or from a third-party, it isn't reasonable for Apple to charge fees on the review process. Doing so is effectively rent seeking, interposing themselves in commerce while adding zero value to that commerce compared with other alternatives. Doing so distorts the free market for in-app payment processors by basically making that market not exist. And so on.

And Apple already charges a fee for the review process. Every developer has to pay a $99 a year to distribute apps through the store. That's paying for app reviews and a couple of DTS incidents. If that isn't adequate to cover the costs, then Apple needs to make that reflect the actual cost of app review.

And IMO, Apple should be forced to open up the platform to third-party app stores globally, allowing companies to choose whether to pay that fee or distribute their app through a third-party store instead. Building a platform should not give you carte blanche authority to say what apps run on that platform, because Apple does not own the hardware once a consumer buys it. It looks like a sale, so it is a sale. And at that point, the law recognizes customers' rights to do pretty much whatever they want to with the hardware, up to and including wiping it and running Android if they can figure out how.

There's no clear security justification for not requiring Apple to provide a switch on iOS similar to the one on macOS that lets you install apps signed by Apple and distributed outside the store, nor for providing a switch that lets you install and run unsigned apps with the same security mechanism that macOS provided prior to code signing. It worked well enough to keep users safe for decades, and the code is already there. All they have to do is turn it on, provide a little bit of UI integration, and maybe unify the keychain implementation if they haven't already done so by now.

Users who want the current model would just not go into Settings and change the setting. Apple can have three or four dire warnings about how doing this reduces the security of the phone before allowing users to do so, ensuring that only users who understand what they are doing throw the switch.

And there's no clear justification at all for Apple demanding that third-party app stores pay money for sales of apps that Apple doesn't actually review. That is *pure* rent seeking. Apple isn't providing *any* value in those transactions, but is still charging money ("core technology fee"). No way should that be allowed. Users already pay for the operating system as part of the cost of buying the device. Those fees are pure double dipping, and that's really not okay to charge two parties for the same purchase.

The more Apple clings to control over the platform, the more fines they are going to get, both in the U.S. and the European Union. One company exercising near-monopolistic control over a large chunk of the cellular phone market is inherently problematic, and using that monopoly to control an unrelated market (apps) by deliberately preventing consumers from being able to install alternative app stores that avoid those fees is IMO a flagrant violation of antitrust law. I'm glad the courts have affirmed that.

I guess they need to use Yandex for that.

I'm wondering about that, because for years Google has had better resolution, but not 97% coverage.

Maybe that's the worst case, and it's better in areas with better satellite photographs available. I think Google uses aerial photography too, to get views from different angles.

Many developed economies are based on there being infinite growth. Without it, pensions, healthcare, society in general will collapse.

Either we go cold turkey and charge the whole basis of our socio-economic systems, or we have some immigration to ease the transition.

There are obvious flaws. What about Swiss citizens who just want to reunite their family? "Sorry, we hit the quota for this year, and there next decade isn't looking good either."

Lottery? Great for business planning.