No Kings, No Monopolies: How App Store Gatekeepers Enable Authoritarianism

Last month, Americans rallied against the Trump administration’s sweeping authoritarian power grabs under a unifying banner—“No Kings”—invoking the nation’s founding tradition. But the founders also understood that casting off the chains of monarchy requires breaking the shackles of monopoly. The 1776 Boston Tea Party, for instance, repudiated not just King George’s crown, but his grant of a tea monopoly to the British East India Company.

A century later, as Congress debated the nation’s first federal antitrust laws, Senator John Sherman echoed: “If we will not endure a king as a political power… we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.” Today, the marriage between private and public power is as strong as ever. In his farewell address, President Biden warned of an increasingly powerful “tech-industrial complex.” Days later, that warning proved prescient as the Big Tech oligarchs took front row seats at Donald Trump’s inauguration.

The corrosive effects of concentrated economic power on democracy can often feel abstract. But they snapped into sharp focus when Apple and Google, under pressure from the Trump administration, removed ICEBlock, Red Dot, and similar apps—tools that allow citizens to crowdsource sightings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) officials—from their app stores. Just yesterday, digital rights watchdogs sued the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) and the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) to uncover whether the administration’s demands amounted to unconstitutional censorship.