I agree that there is a problem with them not allowing different descriptions in different countries, and I agree that they should add this feature to the store.
I wouldn’t have a problem with this being litigated on its own merits. I can see potential legal arguments.
I don’t see what this has to do with antitrust or the rest of the claims, which just seem like a tortured way to introduce an ethical dimension to the argument.
No proposed antitrust remedy has anything to do with challenging authoritarian regimens. If anything the remedies would make the situation worse.
One obvious pathological outcome is that if Apple is forced to create infrastructure to allow multiple stores, every authoritarian state will trivially mandate the installation of a state run store app, with all manner of tracking, privacy abuses, etc., even the ones which had previously had no leverage over Apple.
What's more, Apple doesn't prevent those users entering payment card details into websites they reach by other means; this protection is patchy at best. Nor does it prevent apps using psychological tricks to maximise their revenue through the platform itself, e.g. as with many gambling and gaming apps.
So with the best will in the world I can't see that this security angle justifies the anti-competitive behaviour.
I'll also observe that in most card schemes, account holders aren't liable for fraudulent transactions. Although I would concede that many scams aren't technically fraudulent (merely egregious, unfair, and deceptive), and that naive users often don't understand their rights or how to assert them.
Clearly a browser that didn’t let you enter text would have been unacceptable and the iPhone would have failed as a product.
On the other hand, it’s clear that Apple does actually see this as a serious problem, which is why ApplePay for the web exists, and I know quite a few people who feel far safer with websites that use it.
The argument that Apple hasn’t yet made the web safe for their users even though they are working on it, therefore they should abandon the safety have managed to achieved on the store doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
The web angle is simply demonstrating by contrast that the claim these hardline rules exist for online safety is horse shit. If they were prepared to irrevocably cripple one functional area for safety’s sake, why not another?
The answer is, because that was never the goal.
These rules are simply the protectionist use of market power, and by obliging other vendors to mislead consumers, become an abuse of market power.
