I would not be at all surprised if there was a certain amount of “jeez those tech companies are too liberal, we gotta take them down a peg” in Kavanaugh’s decision – but if I believe this is generally the right decision, I shouldn’t be changing my mind just because some asshole also thinks it’s the right decision.
The only question in my mind is – is there a specific, immediate hazard that gets created if this specific power is taken away from Apple, and nothing else changes? The obvious one to me is, if Apple’s prevented from monopolizing the app store, they lose the power to prevent people from installing apps which they don’t like. If you’re looking for some worst case white supremacist scenario, suppose, that would be like now you can go to a third-party app store and download KlanFinder or something like that. This is basically the situation with Android already, so it’s not clear to me that this like… terrible. Inasmuch as I agree with Apple’s censorship, this is bad, but I already don’t agree 100% with Apple’s system and censorship. There are positives here too – there are apps I’d love to get/distribute which won’t appear in the app store for structural reasons (mainly small open source projects).
IMO the thing keeping Big Tech honest at the moment is not the values of the leadership, it’s the values of the workers. Breaking up big companies is not going to change that landscape, and I actually think overall the effect of reducing that concentration of power will be generally positive because it reduces the risk that in a few years, when there’s leadership turnover, that concentrated power gets turned to an alarming end.
