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Comment by pfannkuchen | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned in discussions of communications tech monopoly (or “monopoly” in many cases) is the risk of future political censorship by a hypothetical future evil Apple. Centralized market power here isn’t just about unfair profits or bad products, it’s also about control of information (and therefore control of minds).

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Especially considering how these big tech companies seem obsessed with gobbling up communication, and seem to want all of their users communication to go through them.

Sure, Apple makes grandiose statements about its security and privacy. But they are protecting you from others. Apple has the keys to the kingdom and if they want they can just silently push a targeted software update to your device.

They can make your phone send messages you never typed. They can make your phone show you things that never happened. They could trivially influence an election, and it doesn't even take the entire org being in on it.

> They can make your phone send messages you never typed. They can make your phone show you things that never happened.

How many microseconds do you think it'd take before someone noticed and made it into a huge PR nightmare?

If it was well targeted and thought out? We'd be lucky if someone even realized it happened. And even then, they'll probably just blame it on a hack from $OTHERCOUNTRY

Everything you said is hypothetically true but fails to withstand scrutiny.

Apple has a brand of trust and security. If they decided to become even the tiniest bit evil in that dimension their “secure” brand would evaporate overnight.

Unless you think they control all media and levers to power too?

The org has that brand. Could be that a small part of the org with access to the correct tech has different ideas. Like I said, the entire org doesn't have to be in on it.

I don't actually believe this is actually happening, but it could.

What, if they did something like set up a massive ad sales team after banning FBs competing tools and literally went to all the gaming advertisers and told them that Apple would still let them target on payment status?

Something like that, perhaps?

Fortunately we live in a world where corporations are never hypocrites, so that definitely didn't happen.

First off, I’m far more concerned about end-user security and privacy than anti-competitive moves.

For the latter I’m sure the FTC will cover that in their antitrust suit.

Secondly do you have a link for your targeting claims?

I hope this does get covered in the suits, but im sceptical.

The targeting stuff was all verbal communication from Apple sales reps, i dont have a link.

Apple, we "care about privacy". But we will take billions of dollar every year to keep your data funneled towards Google via the defaults.

Steve Jobs was barely out the door before Cook ran to allow PRISM access, something Job's had fought against for years.

There is a lot of discussion going on about this. Most of it is not very constructive, but "power structure" research is a scientific thing that might interest you.

> the risk of future political censorship by a hypothetical future evil Apple

Apple's already exercising a great deal of editorial control over all political content on Apple TV+, so it's not too hard to imagine them extending this philosophy to other domains.

Unlike HBO, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. if you want to make a TV show on Apple TV+, you're not allowed to criticize technology or technology companies too heavily in dystopian fiction. They forced Jon Stewart to straight-up leave because he wanted to make an episode critical of China, and also wanted to interview Lina Khan.

I think this is because we haven’t really seen it. Though there is a subset of the right wing that’s been saying exactly this is happening, to them in the context of Facebook and Twitter. I don’t recall seeing any convincing evidence though.

AFAIK we did see how Apple banned political apps in China and Russia.

Yes, but this is not “Evil Apple”, but the respective governments of those countries forcing Apple to take the action on penalty of being ejected from and country. This is abusive government, not abusive corporation (though it’s arguable that an appeasing company might as well be evil.)

Yes, but it perfectly demonstrates what could happen, and people affected don't care about the reason. The actual problem is the monopoly. Also try to force GNU/Linux to remove some packages.

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