Opening the Walled Garden: Global Regulation and the Unbundling of Apple’s Ecosystem
Apple Inc. is being forced to open its ecosystem—just not everywhere, and not all at once. From Tokyo to Seoul to Brussels, regulators are rewriting the rules of platform governance, often with different assumptions, tools, and end goals. The result is not a single global standard, but a growing patchwork of experiments in how much control platforms should retain—and at what cost.
This post examines what those experiments reveal. It explores the shift toward ex ante regulation, the tension between openness and design, the rise of regulatory benchmarking across jurisdictions, and the evolving economics of the so-called “Apple Tax.” Along the way, it asks a broader question: whether regulators can—and should—be calibrating complex digital ecosystems, or whether that task is better left to competition, experimentation, and consumer choice.