Apple, thanks for disabling Facebook and Google’s applications?

If you’ve been following tech news this week I’m sure you’ve read about how Facebook has been tracking teenage customers with a “research” app. Teens were payed by Facebook to install a custom VPN that spied on all of their activities. Facebook admitted to TechCrunch that it was running the research program, Apple responded by blocking Facebook’s developer certificate. Later it was exposed that Google had also violated Apple’s app policy and had their certificate similarly revoked. The specific policy broken was around installing the app on devices outside of their company which is against the Developer Program Terms.

Apple issues iOS developer certificates to companies allowing them to install software on their employee’s machines without distributing it through the app store. This is useful for internal apps, testing purposes, and a variety of other uses. The Apple Developer Program has an annual fee of $99 for individuals and $299 for companies. The alternative is to distribute appls through the app store where Apple takes 30%. This program gives Apple control over what software can run on any iOS device and allowed them to put a stop to Facebook and Google’s activities.

Apple, Facebook, and Google are all massive companies that command their respective markets. They now seem to have the type of power that Microsoft once did in the 90s. So I have to think back to that decades-old Microsoft antitrust case. When in 1994, Netscape released Navigator for $50 prompting Microsoft to create Internet Explorer and bundle it with Windows for free.

It was determined that giving Internet Explorer to people for free was in fact hurting consumers. Both the United States and Europe took action to crack down on Microsoft. The hope was to break Microsoft into separate companies, but in the end the agreement from Microsoft was a promise to make Windows interoperable with non-Microsoft software and to not conspire to keep competitors from being excluded.  This meant the option of using any browser with any rendering engine. While most people believe they should have pushed harder to break up Microsoft it seems clear today that this government action made room for new players including Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon. It’s also hard to imagine this type of action for free services today. Without it we would all probably be using Hotmail on our windows phone and search Bing for our friends new Microsoft Friends page. Microsoft would have been acquiring startups at the rate that Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple are today, but while regulators seem uninterested today, they chose to take action in the 90s.

So with this historical context in mind, I have to question if Apple’s actions going head to head with Facebook and Google is the great altruistic action it’s being portrayed as. After all, how would we have reacted if Microsoft had not only competed with Netscape, but also required them to share 30% of revenue, forced them to use the same rendering engine, maintained the power to ban Navigator, and charged a yearly fee so their developers could write code?

Perhaps the predatory nature of today’s internet from phishing schemes, to viruses, to companies acquiring all of our personal data means we can not have the openness of 25 years ago. Perhaps we can no longer install the software we want without blessing from the company we purchased our device from. Perhaps we can no longer program for our peers without paying for the privilege. Maybe we need a company to stand guard and protect us. Or maybe history will repeat itself with new regulators helping to pave the way for a new round of competition. Most likely I'm just getting old. I honestly don’t know, but it’s hard to see a clear hero and villain, just shades of grey.