One rotten Apple

Today, a visitor to the Rhine River valley in Germany can gawk at the imposing stone castles that loom over the riverbanks, marveling at their romantic grandeur. During medieval times, however, these castles held a very different meaning for travelers. They were the homes of the “robber barons,” local lords who exploited their landholdings along this crucial trade route to extract exorbitant tolls from merchant barges. This term was later applied to the late 19th-century American industrialists who made millions by controlling critical rail routes or cornering natural resource monopolies. Today, their heirs are tech giants like Apple, which, having cornered control of the greatest chokepoint in the digital economy—the App Store—has had a virtual license to print money for the past 20 years.

Although we’re all familiar with the maxim “with great power comes great responsibility,” such monopolists rarely see the world that way. Since their power is informal and the result, as they see it, of their entrepreneurial daring, they rarely feel a duty to use it to protect those who pass through their portals. Indeed, Apple’s track record makes the Rhine robber barons look positively benign by comparison, since much of the traffic through which it has enriched itself is not a trade in wheat or ore, but a traffic in the minds, souls, and sometimes even bodies of young people.

This week, a new organization founded to hold today’s robber barons accountable, the Digital Childhood Institute, launched an assault on Apple’s digital fortress in the form of a 55-page formal complaint to the Federal Trade Commission. Documenting more than a decade of the tech giant’s callous violations of child safety and parental rights, the complaint may well provoke a formal investigation by the FTC, which under Chairman Andrew Ferguson has shown a fierce commitment to rein in Big Tech and empower parents.

Apple is certainly not the worst offender when it comes to digital threats to childhood—apps like Snapchat and TikTok have been meticulously designed to addict adolescents and feed them age-inappropriate content, and some apps are virtual playgrounds for child sex predators. More recently, other apps have been specifically designed and marketed for their “nudify” capabilities, so that students can generate deepfake pornography of their classmates.

But Apple is certainly no innocent bystander to this digital crime scene. It has aggressively marketed smartphones to teens (88% of whom now own an iPhone) despite overwhelming evidence that few of them are ready for the dangers and addictive impulses of these devices. Semi-smart phones, like the Gabb Phone or Wisephone, are designed with the interests of kids and parents in mind; there is no reason that the design wizards in Cupertino could not have created such devices many years ago. No reason, that is, except the immense profits to be reaped from selling apps to teens.

As the complaint documents, Apple bears heavy responsibility for today’s youth pornography and mental health crisis.

Most fundamentally, Apple has displayed gross negligence in its vetting and rating of apps. For instance, despite the fact that teens are more likely to find pornography on X, which hosts countless hours of X-rated content, than on mainstream porn sites, the App Store lists it as having “infrequent/mild sexual content or nudity.” Apps like TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram, well-known for feeding children adult content and connecting them with sexual predators, are rated safe for 12-year-olds, as is Grok, even with its new widely touted sexual companion feature. Many far more dangerous but less well-known apps have proliferated on the app store for years. Without legal pressure, Apple has every incentive to do minimal vetting (which is after all very expensive) and to maximize the number of apps that are downloaded (which is very lucrative).

Apple has also consistently deceived parents about the efficacy of its parental controls, allowing numerous apps to operate with “in-app browsers” that serve as backdoors to explicit content even when parental controls are turned on—even while suppressing third-party parental control apps that are more reliable. As the complaint writes, “Taken together, these practices reveal a pattern of deception and misleading advertising.”

Perhaps worst of all, the entire premise of the App Store is on legally shaky ground, since every app download comes with a contract, a legally binding agreement between the user and the developer. Minors, of course, cannot enter binding contracts without parental consent, and yet Apple has consistently allowed and encouraged anyone 13 or older to enter into these contracts—which usually involve long pages of legalese agreeing to a systematic collection and monetization of your personal data.

Parents, of course, are not entirely passive victims of this exploitation. Many parents have lined up to buy these phones and download these apps for their kids, buying the lie that their children will be “left behind in a digital world” otherwise. In fact, the children who are flourishing most today are those who have kept their feet firmly anchored in the analog world. But parents need help in the battle against $3 trillion companies. If the FTC will take firm action on this complaint, millions more children may be able to enjoy childhood again, rather than being dragged prematurely into digital adulthood.