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Apple's App Store fight heads to North Dakota
And the company is more worried than you might expect.

SB 2333 is making Apple worry.
Image: Apple
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And the company is more worried than you might expect.
SB 2333 is making Apple worry.
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:
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.
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.
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.
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
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