It's interesting that so much of the 'Anti-Big-Tech' movement over the last decade focused on tangential things like potentially forcing Google to sell Chrome or breaking up Facebook while Apple had this chokehold on the actual financial transactions in their ecosystem.

App store fees is a much more obvious example of something subject to regulatory scrutiny vs what much of what Biden's FTC under Lina Khan was working on.

So yeah there is a weird pass this company gets

As with many questions of what people seem to be focused on, I think this has a lot more to do with media coverage dynamics than the facts on the ground. A major case against App Store fees has been ongoing since 2020, you just don’t hear as much about it because it’s less controversial.

I distinctly remember the transition from "Tech used to be good" to "Tech is actively malicious" being when Epic Games decided to pull a Stallman-tier stunt against Apple over something that had become the industry standard. In fact, it was such a direct shot against Apple's monopolistic control that when the Biden FTC did attack Apple, it was over a handful of side issues[0] that Epic hadn't addressed and were thus still open to pursue[3].

There is still a subset of people who still think Apple's 30% is a religious tithe to keep the App Barbarians out rather than an usurious tax, but those people got a lot quieter once Tim Cook started bribing Trump with shiny plaques.

One other issue with antitrust action against Apple is that, strictly speaking, Apple did nothing (legally) wrong. The mistake we made was in the 1970s when we decided to grant the protections of creative expression to computer code[1]. Apple's argument - which, so far, courts have been willing to accept without issue - is that they are allowed to charge whatever they want for their work. It is very difficult (though not impossible) to argue that Apple deciding to bill developers for the OS instead of users is anticompetitive - in fact, Epic's lawsuit failed specifically on those grounds.

Anyway, you should probably bug your politicians to sponsor OAMA, or whatever new bill is being introduced to replace OAMA. The solution to Apple has to be legislated, not litigated.

Aside from that, the rest of Big Tech is significantly more vulnerable to antitrust than Apple is. Breaking up Facebook would actually be way more consequential than you think. Basically all of Facebook's apps were things bought specifically to destroy competition. They control the political narrative in every country in ways most newsmedia would only dream of[2]. There's a book you ought to read - Careless People - written by an ex-Facebook exec that Mark Zuckerberg is currently trying to sue into the ground.

[0] "Super apps" and third-party Apple Watch pairing

[1] To be clear, I do NOT believe code should be considered expression and I have far less qualms about AI slop code than I do AI slop art.

[2] This is also why Elon Musk bought Twitter - although, in that case, he was a lot less successful than Zuck was.

[3] To be clear, if any DOJ attempted to sue Apple over the 30% today, it'd probably fail at the pleading stage.