How Apple's walled garden protects ICE

Summary

Hello and welcome to Regulator.Of all the strange, unintended consequences stemming from major lawsuits, I never thought that the Trump administration’s power to force Apple to remove ICE-tracking mobile apps from its stores could have been connected to a legal battle over Fortnite V-Bucks.Yes, we are talking about the in-game digital currency that Fortnite players can use to buy taco hats and trending zoomer dance emotes for their avatars. Yes, they’re the ones you can purchase as gift cards at CVS for a 9-year-old’s emergency birthday gift. But at one point, they were the subject of two major lawsuits filed by developer Epic Games, a massive gaming company that has pulled in over $5 billion in yearly revenue since 2020, that sought to break Apple’s and Google’s ironclad control over what apps could be downloaded onto iPhones and Androids. Apple won its case, but it’s turned into a monkey’s paw-esque curse for the company. “By virtue of Apple getting what it wants,” Verge executive editor Jake Kastrenakes told me, “it now is in this unfortunate position in which the government can pressure it to do stuff that it does not want.”Some background: In 2020, Epic Games began offering mobile Fortnite players the option to purchase deeply discounted V-Bucks directly from its store, bypassing the massive 30 percent cut that Apple and Google would earn if users made purchases through the App Store and Google Play, respectively. (At the time, Fortnite, at that point the most popular game in the world, had made $1 billion through mobile transactions alone.) The game was abruptly kicked off both platforms for breach of contract. But Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney had purposefully done this as the pretext for a lawsuit: Epic immediately sued both tech giants, claiming that they were engaging in anticompetitive behavior.While a jury eventually found that the Android Play Store was an illegal monopoly and Apple was eventually forced to ease restrictions on how app users could pay for ...