Apple’s unlawful evil
Everyone’s a rogue capitalist now.
I’m on a tour with my new book Enshittification: Catch me next in Cambridge, MA; Washington, DC and Brooklyn! Full schedule with dates and links here.
Apple has removed ICEBlock, a totally legal app that helps people track the movements of the masked snatch-squads who illegally terrorize brown people in America’s cities, capitulating to a warrantless demand from Trump’s DoJ boss Pam Bondi:
https://www.404media.co/iceblock-owner-after-apple-removes-app-we-are-determined-to-fight-this/
In killing ICEBlock, Apple insists that it is only complying with lawful orders, which is patently untrue. Pam Bondi has no authority to order the censorship of this legal speech tool, which is likely why she didn’t seek a court order and instead merely rage-tweeted about it. This was sufficient to get Apple CEO Tim Cook, the billionaire who moved Apple’s manufacturing to Chinese sweatshops where working conditions are so brutal that they require suicide nets, to cave in.
Apple does not permit its iPhone customers to install software unless it is delivered via their App Store. They claim they do so in order to protect their customers from their customers’ own bad choices about which apps to install. But time and again, Apple has shown that they exercise this control over their users to pursue their own ends, blocking:
- A dictionary (because it contained swear words);
- A game that simulated working in an Apple sweatshop;
- An informative app that cataloged civilian casualties of US drone strikes;
- The Tumblr app because some Tumblr blogs contained adult content; and
- Working VPN apps for the entire nation of China.
Apple uses its app store control to extract 30 cents out of every dollar spent by its customers in the apps they use. That’s a 30%, economy-wide, worldwide tax on news outlets and podcasts that collects subscriptions through apps, Patreon performers whose subscribers pay by app and games publishers who sell via the app store.
Apple also uses its app store control to block rival browser engines (every browser on iOS is just a reskinned version of Safari). Apple’s own browser engine, Webkit, is riddled with longstanding, grave security vulnerabilities, and there is no way to distribute more secure browsers on iOS:
https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban-persists-even-under-the-dma/
Apple claims that it must be able to override its customers’ choices about which software they’d like to run, lest those customers make foolish software choices and compromise their own security. Bruce Schneier calls this “feudal security,” in which a digital warlord offers you sanctuary from the internet’s roving bandits within the mercenary-studded walls of his impenetrable fortress. The problem is that when the warlord decides to attack you, the fortress becomes a prison, and you are rendered helpless:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained
Normally, the safety problems of feudal security are digital, but with ICEBlock, they are very, very physical. ICE is kidnapping our neighbors and sending them to offshore and onshore gulags. Of the 1,600 people illegally detained in Alligator Auschwitz, two thirds cannot be located. They have disappeared:
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/9/25/alligator_alcatraz
In removing ICEBlock, Apple has deprived its customers of a vital tool for evading these kidnapping, murdering, masked thugs.
ICE moved from targeting “the worst of the worst” to targeting “people here illegally” to “people who look foreign” to “people who live in cities”:
https://federate.social/@mattblaze/115323465203575305
You know who would have been at the top of that list? Steve Jobs, who died 14 years ago today:
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/10/05/remembering-steve/
Steve Jobs was “the anchor baby of an activist Arab muslim who came to the US on a student visa and had a child out of wedlock”:
https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-steve-jobs/
He is exactly the sort of person that Trump wants to deport.
Jobs isn’t the only foreigner whose company is helping Trump round up and disappear foreigners. Google — co-founded by Soviet refugee Sergey Brin — has killed RedDot, a similar tool to ICEBlock:
https://www.neowin.net/news/following-apple-google-pulls-ice-spotting-app-red-dot-from-play-store/
Google has also announced that they will nonconsensually update every Android device in the world to prevent their owners from installing software that Google hasn’t approved:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/01/fulu/#i-am-altering-the-deal
When China hacked Gmail in order to target dissidents, Sergey Brin unilaterally pulled the company out of China, gripped by visceral horror of his platform being used for totalitarian oppression. Today, Brin is taking away his customers’ best tool for evading ICE kidnappers on behalf of a self-declared “dictator.” Hey, Sergey, one Soviet refugee’s son to another, that’s some pretty Vichy bullshit, landsman.
Under Trump’s policies, neither Apple nor Google would exist today. These companies both claim that they have to “obey the law” but this isn’t following a lawful order — it’s going above and beyond the law to help a dictator kidnap their customers.
When China turned on Google’s users, Google left the country. When the European Union ordered Apple to open up to third party app stores, Apple threatened to leave Europe:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers
But when Pam Bondi ordered Apple and Google to help her round up their own customers, Brin and Cook didn’t even ask for a court order.
You could not ask for a better example of the failure of feudal security. Nor could you ask for a better rebuttal to the “Surveillance Capitalism” claim that Google is a “rogue capitalist” (because it spies on you for profit) while Apple is a good capitalist (because they extract money, not private data):
https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism
Apple spies on you, of course. And because they trap you in the App Store’s airtight bubble, they block you from installing any software that would protect you from Apple’s surveillance. And now, Apple has thrown in with the Trump regime’s most violent, human-rights invading program: mass kidnappings and disappearances of thousands of our neighbors.
Truly, everyone’s a “rogue capitalist” now. It’s almost like the problem with companies isn’t whether their business model is based on showing you ads or charging you money, but rather, whether they can abuse you for profit and get away with it.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/
