Dishwashers have become iPhones

Apple is a true business innovator: For more than a decade, they have been steadily perfecting an obscure anticompetitive tactic, turning a petty grift invented by console games companies into a global, cross-industry mechanism for extracting rents and centralizing control.

I’m speaking of App Stores, of course, and not just any app store, but one that’s illegal to compete with or switch away from. This started with console companies, who used technical tricks to ensure that they could skim a rake from every program you bought for your system.

Consoles used proprietary hardware or media formats to ensure that software vendors couldn’t sell directly to you, that every sale would be forced through their storefronts or licensing systems.

These tactics acquired the force of law in 1998 after Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose Section 1201 made it a felony to traffic in “circumvention devices” that bypassed “access controls” for copyrighted works.

Broadly, that meant that you could go to prison (for five years!) for making anti-DRM tools. What’s more, DMCA 1201’s drafters rejected tying the law to acts of copyright infringement, making it illegal to remove DRM, even if you did so for a perfectly legal reason.