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Comment by fixermark | Hacker News Reader

It's nice they have the capacity to do that to protect their consumer ecosystem (indirectly), however, if I'm making an enterprise ecosystem decision to build out a fleet of mobile tools for my company, "Apple has and has used the capacity to shut down the ability of the hardware we purchased to run software we wrote on that hardware" gives me pause adopting that ecosystem.

Their purpose was generally-accepted as just in this case, but what if next time, it's because someone started competing with them and they didn't like it?

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Tech has a long and storied history of anti-competitive behavior by the platform owner, even without fancy signed code + crypto:

* Microsoft and the games they played with 4DOS, undocumented calls, testing for id strings and then claiming windows woulden't run on the "Incompatible" DOS variant

* Apple re-implementing shareware utilities in the System 6/7/8/9 days right into the operating system, sometimes not compensating the original developer for the idea

* MS Word using undocumented API's for better UX + integration over all word processors in the 90s/00s

* Twitter Changing Platform API and kicking out all sorts of useful apps on their platform

* Facebook doing the same

At least this time around, there's a clear kill switch so they don't have to be underhanded about it. And in this instance there was a clear and unambiguous ToS violation in play. Most of the instances I've listed went unpunished, or were only given a slap on the wrist after the damage was done.

The license to do that comes with a contract. Facebook broke the terms of that agreement. If you don't plan on doing the same, you have nothing to worry about.

That reads an awful lot like the reasoning "You don't have to be concerned about government privacy or authority overreach if you don't break the law."

Important detail - The agreement says that Apple may do this for the exact reason at hand here - Preventing misuse/abuse of enterprise certificate.

Isn't this exactly what the FTC is for, though?

The FTC is a good backstop, but in the time it takes them to resolve a (potentially antitrust) case, your company could go bankrupt. As an enterprise purchaser, it may not be risk I want to take on for the benefit of using Apple hardware and software for internal solutions.

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