Yes, the advertising industry seems like it’s the more relevant institution in this particular case. Apple’s culpability has mostly to do with doing nothing to

Yes, the advertising industry seems like it’s the more relevant institution in this particular case. Apple’s culpability has mostly to do with doing nothing to mitigate the runaway race to the bottom in during the App Store’s earliest days, but that would've happened even if they hadn’t taken the walled garden approach. Surveillance capitalism is the inevitable end state where on the web and in apps, ads are the most readily accessible, consistent, and sometimes lucrative form of monetization. > Note that the businesses who are lobbying against Apple are operating on the very same capitalist, profit-optimizing interests that drove Apple to choose a walled-garden approach. They are not doing this to make the world a better place, and the vast majority of smartphone users do not even care about this “issue”. They’re all blatantly self-interested, but Spotify is perhaps the biggest hypocrite among them. They’re continuously bolstering their dominance in the streaming music space at the cost of both users and artists, and when Apple gives them features they’ve asked for they refuse to use them because that’d weaken their case. They only care because if it weren’t for Apple Music they’d for all practical purposes have a monopoly.