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:
We must ask whether ... we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to replace the question: "Who should rule?" by the new question: "How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?" — Karl Popper,
"The Open Society and Its Enemies"
Without a counterweight, network effects allow successful tech firms to concentrate wealth and political influence. This power allows them to degrade potential competitive challenges, enabling rent extraction for services that would otherwise be commodities. This mechanism operates through (often legalised) corruption of both legal and electoral systems, and when left to fester, is caustic to democracy itself.
As we shall see, Apple has deftly used a false cloak of security and privacy to move the internet, and web in particular, toward enclosure and irrelevance. Below, I develop the case for why Apple should be considered a corrupted, and indeed incompetent, autocrat in the digital lives of millions, abusing a unique form of monopoly to extract rapacious rents, including on the last remnants of open ecosystems it tolerates.
Worse, Apple's centralisation through the App Store entrenches the positions of peer big tech firms, harming the prospects of competitors in turn. I submit that Apple have been, over the course of many years, poisonous to internet standards and the moral commitments embodied in that grand project.
Despite near continuous horse-race coverage in the tech press, the consequences of this regression in civic/technical affairs is not well socialised.
One reason to champion the cause of standardisation is that it signifies the expansion of interoperable technology to carry a growing part of our digital workloads, pushing firms to innovate, rather than extracting rents for access to commodity features.
Interoperability-in-being allows users to choose alternative implementations, forcing competitors to differentiate on quality and not yet standard features. Standards accelerate the emergence of true interoperability by lowering the costs implementation and reducing tails risks to implementers, e.g. from patent trolls. Over time, a vibrant and growing set of standards can attenuate the power of vendors to extract rents and prevent progress in important domains.
Interoperability is not the only mechanism that can dampen the power of dominant firms, but it is the most powerful. Free and Open Source software ( FOSS ) can provide a counterweight to rentiers, but OSS is not a full solution.
Interoperability, and the economic surpluses that flow from it, are underpinned by the bedrock principle of voluntary adoption. This is enshrined in the "open stand" principles agreed to by no less than ISOC, IETF, IAB, IEEE, and the W3C.:
... 5. Voluntary Adoption Standards are voluntarily adopted and success is determined by the market. — The IAB, IEEE, IETF, ISOC, and W3C,
"The OpenStand Principles"
This final principle is the shortest, and many readers will understand it a dodge; a way for Standards Development Organisations ( SDOs ) to avoid being seen to "picking winners". But it is not only that.
By citing a property of markets that must be materially available for internet standards to function, this principle implicitly binds participants to a presumption of fair play, both for themselves, and for others in the ecosystems that standards bodies facilitate.
Several implications bear mentioning.
First, the principle of voluntary adoption is a predicate for effective standards' development. Without some mechanism for determining which designs are good vs. bad, we are unable to make consistent progress, and that test never comes from within an SDO ; it is always extrinsic and customer-defined. Writing a standard is not a test of quality, and conversely, without a functional market in which to test designs, SDOs are irrelevant.
Second, this principle outlines a live-and-let-live doctrine, both within standards bodies and in the market. Participants may want their design to "win", but are enjoined from using procedural shenanigans to prevent competing designs from also being standardised.
Lastly, voluntary adoption marks customers (developers) and suppliers (browser vendors, etc.) as peers worthy of mutual respect and creates a clear norm within the walls of SDOs .
For all of these reasons, voluntary adoption must be inviolable, and actions taken to undermine it must be met with resistance and eventual sanction.
Regulators have had no difficulty in building market tests that demonstrate the power Apple holds in the lives of users.
Some of these tests have produced comical contortions as Apple has attempted to weasel out of its responsibilities. Consider the Trinitarian claim that Safari is simultaneously one product, and also three. Or that iPadOS, despite sharing nearly all code with iOS, being marketed under that brand for many years, supporting considerably identical features, running all the same third-party software, and being released on substantially the same cadence, while running exclusively on hardware of the same architecture as iOS devices is, somehow, an entirely different product.
But these tests, for as clear and effective as they have been, do not capture the most important aspects of Apple's influence on the market for smartphone software.
Apple's ability to negatively impact the potential of standards-based platforms to disrupt the App Store relies on properties of the market that every software developer understands: a monopoly on wealthy users, and through it, influence.
Competition law does not explicitly recognise or endorse this distortion of the market structure, but the connection between the influence of wealthy users and the downstream choices available to other end-users is indisputable in mobile ecosystems.
Despite selling fewer than a quarter of smartphone devices every year for the past decade, Apple has maintained iron control over the way smartphone software is developed and delivered, owing to the social and market effects of wealthy users gravitating to iOS devices. Apple uses both legitimately superior product attributes (e.g., leading chip design) along with anti-user and anticompetitive tactics — e.g., green vs. blue chat bubbles, suppression of browsers — to maintain this position.
Apple imposes an interlocking set of restrictions to help ensure that standards-based platforms cannot disrupt its position as the primary arbiter and delivery channel of software for wealthy users. Those users, in turn, enjoy disproportionate influence over the behaviour of software developers, owing both to their greater spending power, and their collective ability to determine the relevance of competing platforms thanks to their positions within the software industry. Developers of all stripes understand that if they cannot demo their wares to the bosses and VCs (all of whom are wealthy) on their own devices, their software might as well not exist.
The long-stable propensity of users who make more than $100K USD/year to carry iPhones combines with Apple's suppression of browsers and PWA capabilities to ensure that developers have no effective choice but to build native applications, for which Apple extracts rents. These effects were visible in population-level statistics a decade ago and have been stable ever since:
Knowing whether someone owns an iPad in 2016 allows us to guess correctly whether the person is in the top or bottom income quartile 69 percent of the time. Across all years in our data, no individual brand is as predictive of being high-income as owning an Apple iPhone in 2016. — Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica,
"Coming Apart? Cultural Distances in the United States Over Time"
Over time, the effect becomes self re-enforcing: developers are forced into the App Store due to a lack of capabilities in browsers, granting proprietary ecosystems a library of software with no interoperable parallel. This further induces wealthy and influential users to seek software exclusively through App Stores.
The monopoly on influence explains in part why Apple is wedded to legalistic, dissembling tactics in order to prevent the spread of standards-based platforms. Should the work of internet and web standards bodies ever become relevant, Cupertino understands the market for software will transform in ways it cannot control or tax.
Developers are forced into the App Store, first and foremost, by a lack of functionality in standards-based alternatives. By contrast, Apple has used over-broad grants of system capabilities to woo developers with an interest in monetising user data through too-broad grants of detailed information about users and unconscionable allowances for suppressing pro-privacy interventions by the most rapacious native apps. When Apple professes that "privacy is a human right", we must understand this as an attempt to turn the consequences of Apple's own largesse towards data abusers into a marketing asset and an attempt to convince users not to flee the proprietary ecosystem it favours.
These over-broad grants depend, fundamentally, on Apple's own decisions.
It was Apple's choice to introduce less safe, less privacy-preserving native apps into iOS. It was also Apple's choice to deny competing browsers engines the freedom of voluntary feature adoption, ensuring that important underlying capabilities could only ever be accessed through Apple's proprietary APIs, and only ever by those who are willing to agree to Cupertino's terms.
The result has been API enclosure; appropriation of commodity capabilities that themselves are standards-based — e.g., USB, Bluetooth, NFC, file storage, etc. — by a proprietary ecosystem and denial of even the safest and most privacy-preserving versions of those features by open, interoperable, and standards-based application platforms.
This, in turn, has created a winner-take-all dynamic inside the app store, harming privacy, security, and competition in the process.
This strategy relies on a set of interlocking policies that harm competitors and prospective challengers. The sabotage of voluntary adoption lies at its heart. A Bill of Particulars for crimes against the web and internet community springs from a relatively small set of undisputed facts.
Apple has:
Restricted competitors from delivering their own implementations of web and internet standards, depriving them access to Apple's monopolised controls of influential users.
Forced all iOS browsers to use Apple's own, defective and impoverished, implementations, depriving users of choice and destroying the market's ability to select for better ideas and implementations.
Compelled browser engine monoculture and, in so doing, consistently undermined user security and privacy.
Attempted to use contractual terms to dissuade competitors from extending browsers to support standards that Apple disfavours.
Serially misled regulators and the public when presented with evidence of the harms that spring directly from the above.
Objected spuriously in bad faith within standards bodies to prevent standardisation of features which Apple offered no counter-proposal.
Since at least 2015, delivered explicitly pejorative UI and marketing to discourage use of open and interoperable technologies that might benefit users at its own expense.
Through these and other overt acts, Apple has worked to disempower users, depriving them of choice in the market, and thereby devaluing the effectiveness of interoperable, standards-based platforms.
These acts are not simply the competitive acts of a fierce market participant. Apple has done violence to the founding ethos of internet and web standards development. Instead of honourably withdrawing from those groups, Apple has maintained a charade of engagement, and gaslights other participants while actively sabotaging the principle of voluntary adoption that internet standards are predicated on.
It must be emphasised that Apple has never been forced to suppress its competitors, nor to create an anticompetitive landscape. At every moment, Cupertino's senior management have retained intellectually consistent choices that allow it to pursue growth of Apple's superior (we are told) native app ecosystem without creating conditions that threaten browser choice or the good functioning of internet standards.
Let's consider two: all safe browsers, and no browsers.
Apple could, of course, simply enable the same sort of level playing field for high-quality browsers that every competing vendor has for nearly the web's entire history, and which Apple has itself facilitated on macOS. Any plausible restriction owing to available system resources has long been overcome by progress in mobile hardware, particularly within Apple's ecosystem. Early mobile era justifications based on API richness and resource availability were falsified by even the lowliest Androids to more than a decade ago.
The only conscionable restrictions on competing browser engines spring from demonstrable failures to safeguard security. As other vendors have generally had better track records vs. Apple regarding sandboxing strength, security response times, patch gap width, and consistent coverage for users on older OS versions, this should be no practical obstacle.
Lest Apple's defenders worry about the impacts on the company, under true browser choice, Apple retains considerable market advantages, including (but not limited to) pre-installation, lower structural costs , and continued voluntary feature adoption, allowing it to earn users through differentiation. Such bulwarks have allowed Safari to retain considerable share on macOS in spite of stiff competition and Safari's poor track record on security and standards conformance.
Alternatively, Apple could withdraw Safari while forbidding all browsers on iOS. This is a fully consistent position, and one that has been available to Apple from the moment of the iPhone's release. The iPod did not include a browser, and many subsequent Apple OSes lack functional browsers. iOS and VisionOS are uniquely deficient in this regard.
Either way, the choice to undermine choice and standards has rested entirely with Apple. At every moment it has had intellectually honest solutions available to resolve these contradictions of its own design. Apple cannot claim the situation is anyone else's fault, or that it has had no choice.
It should be obvious from the proceeding sections that I do not consider Apple's mere failure to implement standards I personally approve of to rise to the level of the transgression worthy of sanction.
Under voluntary implementation, every vendor is free to ship whatever they please, including Apple. Whilst it may be sad, or even damaging, when features go missing from important products, that is not a calamity. In functioning markets, this is simply an input to be priced. Among browsers, this has traditionally been experienced as vendors gaining or losing share to the extent they support otherwise-interoperable content.
And so it is not enough to cite a lack of features, bungled implementations, peevish behaviour in working groups — or even rank dishonesty — as reason for censure. These are, to a greater or lesser degree, players playing the game within the rules. Some tactics may be distasteful, but reside squarely within the "awful but lawful" category. Venues dedicated to free exchanges of views should allow them, with sanctions for poor behaviour meted out in the social realm, if at all.
Apple's outrages against this community are more fundamental, and more dangerous.
Some will see here a parallel to the Paradox of Tolerance, and I do not believe this is mistaken. Standards bodies can, and should, admit many positions by their participants, but bestowing membership in good standing to those actively uprooting the basis for standards is to ensure that standards, and the ecosystems that depend on them, wither and die.
By subverting the voluntary nature of open standards, Apple has defanged them as tools that users might use against the totalising power of native apps in their digital lives. This high-modernist approach is antithetical to the foundational commitments of internet standards bodies and, over time, erode them.
Indeed, no other vendor has achieved what Apple has in the realm of anticompetitive suppression of the web. We must not imagine that Apple would stop at the Application layer given a chance. The same mechanism threatens voluntary feature adoption in every other layer of the stack, too.
The web and internet communities must understand not only the threat, but the ongoing harms to the cause of the web and of internet standards. It seems to me that this point has hardly been engaged, let alone won, within the walls of SDOs . But if it were, then what? What, practically, can be done?
The founding documents of internet SDOs do not include mechanisms for censure of these violative acts. The W3C's bylaws, for example, only speak to membership in good standing in relationship to payment of dues. Regardless, it is possible — and I believe urgent — to do more.
First, proposals can be raised to amend those documents to include mechanisms for censure by votes of the membership for actions such as those alleged here. These are likely to fail, and will surely be rejected on a first attempt, but the act of constituents considering these questions has power in and of itself. Raising proposals for discussion at plenary meetings and in visible fora can, at a minimum, elicit a response to the charges levied here. That, on its own, is valuable to the community.
Next, leadership boards with moral authority can write persuasively on the question. The W3C's Advisory Board and Technical Architecture Group and the IETF's Internet Architecture Board have the ear of the membership, even on non-technical topics, should they choose to weigh in on the side of the continued relevance of their convening organisations.
Most importantly, individual delegates to working groups of all sorts can recognise that Apple's compellence is illegitimate and corrosive. Having done so, they can resolve not to accept "Apple does not comment on future products" as a viable response to questions about implementation timelines.
As long as Cupertino demands and unjustly defends a monopoly, it is incumbent to demand responsibility for the consequences of Apple's failures.
Apple alone can choose to support features within WebKit and allow them in other iOS browsers, even under compellence, and even if it does not to enable them in Safari. It is simply illegitimate for Apple to claim that it cannot or should not allow other vendors to reach feature parity with competing engines.
The sham of WebKit as an Open Source project is incompatible with disavowal of features that other vendors would flag on for their iOS users if allowed. Compelled implementation and the destruction of voluntary adoption should not be a shield against critique, but instead should heighten expectations based on the responsibilities Apple agues it should be singularly entrusted with, despite Safari and WebKit's trailing record on standards' conformance, security, and privacy.
Apple alone must be on the hook to implement any and every web platform feature shipped by any and every other engine. So long as competing vendors are forced into the App Store and must use Apple's engine, Apple should bear the costs of completeness and feature quality. So long as Cupertino demands implementation compellence, the demand must be echoed back: parity with browser features on other Operating Systems is the minimum bar.
WebKit purports to be Open Source, but in practice Apple has used it to undermine the "bring your own code" foundation of OSS . It is illogical for Apple to cite a disinterest in a feature in Safari as a reason for Apple not to be expected to implement those features in iOS's WebKit binary, making them available for other embedders to flag on.
Fundamentally, the web and internet community must stop accepting the premise that Apple should benefit from the protections and privileges that voluntary adoption affords whilst it denies those benefits to others.
Lastly, and perhaps most controversially, delegates and organisations can use their positions to vote against Apple's personnel in elections to leadership positions within internet and web SDOs . It is, of course, inconsistent for Apple to hold positions of influence in organisations they are actively suppressing, and fellow participants are under no obligation to pretend otherwise or hand Apple formal or even persuasive power within these groups.
In raising these questions, colleagues have invariably asked "why now? What changed?"
Beyond the threshold point that the damage done is cumulative, and therefore it isn't necessary to identify specific instances to discuss the rot Apple's influence has caused, it's fair to ask why anyone should be agitated tomorrow when they might not have been yesterday.
Most of the factors involved have indeed changed very gradually, and humans are famously poor judges of slowly emergent threats. Apple's monopoly on influence, Cupertino's post-2009 WebKit priorities, the suppression of browser competitors, and the never-ending parade of showstopping bugs are all gradually emergent factors. Despite all of this long-running, unrefuted evidence, many continue to think of Apple an ally of the web for helpful acts now more than 15 years old.
But recent events must shake us awake. Apple's petulant attempt to duck regulations, destroy the web as a competitor for good, and frame regulators for the dirty deed was shocking. In recurring misrepresentations to regulators before and since, it has dissembled about its role in suppressing the web, and through its demand for secrecy in quasi-standards processes, has worked tirelessly to cover its tracks.
Taken individually, and in ignorance of iOS's implementation compellence, forced monoculture and habitual security failures, and strategic starvation of the Safari team these shameful acts would simply indicate another monopolist behaving badly. It is only when considered alongside the wider set of facts that the anti-standards strategy and impact become clear.
Like most who have dedicated the greater proportion of their working lives to the cause of an open and interoperable web, the questions and conclusions offered here shock me as well.
In the end, however, the question "do standards matter any more?" is intrusive, despite my aversion to reconsidering a question whose answer I thought obvious. But in light of the past decade's sidelining of the web, we must grapple with the consequences. To allow Apple to continue to abuse the foundation of standards without acknowledgement would be a failure of honesty towards my own intellectual commitments.
My personal affinity for the many talented and thoughtful people that Apple has sent to standards bodies over the years — including those I think of as friends — has, on reflection, been an emotional blind spot. But here we are. The realisation that they have been an unwitting fifth column against the web is nauseating for me, and I expect many will loudly reject the conclusion. I do not blame them.
For all the harm Apple has done to the web and to competition, I had hoped that it would relent before any of this became necessary. Like most web developers, I harboured hope that, true to Steve Job's promise in '07, Apple would let the web be a "sweet solution" for delivering safe, powerful applications. Piggybacked on that hope was a belief that a relevant mobile web would bolster the relevance of standards. But Cupertino has gone a different way, choosing profit over collaboration and the needs of users.
The web matters too much for the standards-based future it represents to fade without so much as a nod.