Apple's Assault on Standards Will we notice? And what can be done?
TL;DR: Market competition underlies the enterprise of standards. It creates the only functional test of designs and functions as a pressure release valve that enables standards-based ecosystems route around single-vendor damage. Without competition, standards bodies have no purpose, and neither they, nor the ecosystems they support, can retain relevance. Apple has poisoned the well through a monopoly on influence which it has parleyed into suppression of browser choice. This is an existential threat to the web, but also renders web and internet standards moot. Internet standards bodies should recognise the threat and respond.
Internet enthusiasts of the previous century were sometimes given to expressing the power of code declaring the sovereignty of cyberspace, or that "code is law."
As odd as these claims sound today, they hit a deep truth: end-users lack power to re-litigate choices embodied in software. Vendors, therefore, have power over them. Backed by deeply embedded control chokepoints, and without a proportional response from other interests, this control is akin to state power.
Both fear and fervour about these proprties developed against a backdrop of libertarian attitudes toward regulation and competition. Attenuating vendor power through interoperability was, among other values, a shared foundation of collaboration for internet pioneers.
The most fervent commitment of this strain was faith in markets to sort out information distribution problems through pricing signals, and that view became embedded deeply into the internet's governance mechanisms. If competition does not function, neither do standards.
The internet's most consequential designs took competitive markets as granted. Many participants believed hardware and software markets would (or should) continue to decouple; that it would be ever easier for end-users to bring software of their choosing to devices they had purchased. Their faith in the trajectory was well-founded. It is ludicrous from the perspective of 2025 to suggest that swapping implementations of nearly any internet standard should come at the cost of replacing hardware.
Internet standards bodies assumed the properties of open operating systems and low-cost replacement of software to such an extent that their founding documents scarcely bother to mention them. Only later did statements of shared values see fit to make the subtext clear.
And it has worked. Internet standards have facilitated interoperability that has blunted lock-in, outsized pricing power, and monopolistic abuses. This role is the entire point of standards at a societal level, and the primary reason competition law carves out space for competitors to collaborate to develop standards.
But standardisation is not purely an economic project. Standards attenuate the power of firms that might seek to arrogate code's privileges. Functional interoperability enables competition, and in so doing, reallocates power to users. Interoperability, and the standards that ensure it, are therefore at least partially a political project; one that aligns with the values of open societies:
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