Policy

Apple's App Store fight heads to North Dakota

And the company is more worried than you might expect.

Apple's App Store fight heads to North Dakota

SB 2333 is making Apple worry.

Image: Apple

There's a new bill that's making Apple nervous, and it's called SB 2333.

It spans all of two pages and makes its point quite clear. It says a "digital application distribution platform" that does than $10 million in revenue in North Dakota each year — which includes every major app store — cannot:

  • "Require a developer to use a digital application distribution platform or digital transaction platform as the exclusive mode of distributing a digital product."
  • "Require a developer to use an in-application payment system as the exclusive mode of accepting payment from a user to download a software application or purchase a digital or physical product through a software application."
  • "Retaliate against a developer for choosing to use an alternative application store or in-application payment system."

Where did this come from? Kyle Davison, the North Dakota state senator who co-sponsored SB 2333, told me the Coalition for App Fairness originally brought up the bill to a firm in Fargo, North Dakota, where Davison and others are working to create more of a tech scene.

  • "We have created an entrepreneurial environment in our community ... that really revolves around innovation," he said. He saw SB 2333 as a way to benefit tech workers in the state, as well as hopefully entice people to move there.
  • It's not a crazy idea: People move to escape income tax, so why wouldn't some software companies move to escape a 30% app store commission?

In essence, the bill demands every platform run like the Mac does. Sure, you can have an app store, charge 30%, use your payment processing, go wild! But you have to also allow people to install and pay for apps in other ways.

  • That is precisely what people like Tim Sweeney and David Heinemeier Hansson have been asking for in recent months. Heinemeier Hansson testified in a hearing about the bill yesterday, and had prepared remarks — which he mostly didn't get to, in favor of refuting the "nonsense" arguments against the bill — that said "the 17 lines of SB 2333 read like music. Written in a language I can understand without hiring counsel to parse it for me."
  • Apple's Erik Neuenschwander made the opposite case, saying that the App Store's ability to stop malware, engender trust and make things easy is crucial. "Senate Bill 2333 threatens to destroy [the] iPhone as you know it," he said.

Before you write this off as being the efforts of one state far afield of the tech industry: don't. It's significant in and of itself that a bill like this made it to public debate, and it obviously has Apple concerned enough to send Neuenschwander, its manager of user privacy, to testify.

  • Davison said after the hearing that he couldn't believe how much attention the issue had gotten: "I think it raises an awareness not just in me but in my colleagues that it is a real issue."
  • He didn't sound particularly confident that it would pass, at least in this first incarnation, but said it was clear that this conversation needed to happen both in North Dakota and elsewhere.
And you should expect to hear about this elsewhere. There's a similar bill under consideration in Arizona, SB 1642, which argues for the exact same thing as the North Dakota bill in almost the exact same way. And I'm told there are other laws like these coming sooner rather than later.
Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins