When Tim Cook completed his appearance before the House Judiciary panel in July, the conventional wisdom was that the Apple CEO was easily fired. He became a member of Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, and each seems more concerned about. In the face of Google’s impending accusation and Facebook’s horrific history of election interference, who could really care about App Store policies?
But after Epic’s dramatic attack on the same App Store policy, the questions directed at Cook feel a bit more pointed – with one exchange, in particular, striking. About an hour after the hearing, rep. Ask Hank Johnson (D-GA) Cook about App Store policies, specifically the decision in April to leave the Amazon Prime video complex to the commission.
“Is that reduced commission, like the one Amazon Prime gets, available to other app developers?” Johnson asked.
“It’s available to anyone who meets the conditions, yes,” replied Cook, an elegant dodge.
Johnson went back and forth with Cook, focusing specifically on the company’s payment processing requirements – a point that was raised in Epic Games’ anti-trust case.
Johnson ended with a question that now seems almost prophetic: “Has Apple ever resisted or discouraged a developer from going public with their frustrations with the App Store?”
“Sir, we do not avenge people like bullying,” Cook said flatly. “It’s strongly against our corporate culture.”
Last week, that culture was put to the test. Since the Epic lawsuit was filed on Thursday, Apple has threatened to cut off Epic’s ability to distribute developer tools, according to a recent court motion. The fight has escalated far beyond the question of in-app purchase costs, and it’s hard to see it as anything other than revenge against the lawsuit.
It’s a sign of how heated the App Store battle has become in just a few short days and how fiercely Apple is ready to defend its commission system. That 30 percent commission is baked into the core of Apple’s business. Epic’s project to remove it is a major anti-trust company, one that Cook will fight at every step.
But Epic will not fight alone. The hearing of technological anti-trust deals with many of the same points as the case of Epic – some in the same exact language. That’s not evidence of collusion, exactly. (These ideas have been circulating in tech critic circles for years.) But it’s a sign of how much support those ideas have in Washington and how likely it is that regulators will intervene on the side of Epic.
It’s a major test of the ideas we’ve heard in the tech antitrust hearing – and there are many other challenges ahead as Epic finds success. Yelp has been trying for solid decades to step up to a similar moment with Google, and there are many companies that want to take over Amazon in a similar way. Apple was the first target, and the easiest, but it will not be the last.
