Apple's Tax Repackages the Microsoft Bundling Playbook

Apple wants to tax purchases you make outside its store—not steal them, not block them, but tax them.

This is the proposal it just filed in court after a judge ordered it to stop taking commissions on external transactions. Epic Games, which filed the original lawsuit, responded with a phrase that should make anyone paying attention sit up straight. Apple's request is "far outside of the bounds" of what the court told them to do.

We have watched this exact move before. In 1995, the Department of Justice sued Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. Taking a browser no one particularly wanted and making it inseparable from the operating system everyone did want. Eighteen years of litigation followed, and when the case finally resolved, the remedy looked comprehensive.

Microsoft had to give computer makers more freedom to remove IE and had to license its APIs to competitors. But what Microsoft retained was the right to build new products into Windows in the future. The loophole swallowed the remedy. Within five years, Microsoft had integrated other services so deeply into the OS that the untangling order became nearly ceremonial. Apple is running the same playbook with a syntax adjustment.

It's not bundling the App Store into the iPhone anymore because courts have already said no to that. Instead, Apple argues that external purchases constitute a security risk or a circumvention of platform services. Therefore deserve a "platform fee." It's bundling repackaged as taxation. The mechanism is identical. The company keeps the phone, keeps the power to define what requires payment, keeps the ability to change the category tomorrow. The first Microsoft remedy failed because courts never shut the door on future tie-ins.

They only forbade the specific one. Watch this time whether the judge names the actual problem—that a company cannot be allowed to decide which outside transactions generate fees—or whether she restricts only the mechanism Apple proposed today. That distinction will tell you whether the lesson has been learned, or whether we're just watching it repeat with better lawyers.