A deep dive into the aggressive lobbying tactics that Apple is using to fight app store bills in Georgia, Arizona, North Dakota, Louisiana, and other US states
Context & Ripple Effects
Politico's deep dive lands after a year of documented escalation in the states. In March 2021, Protocol detailed how Apple ramped up its Arizona operation — including hiring Gov. Ducey's ex-chief of staff — just as the legislature weighed a bill to let apps use outside payment systems; weeks later the Arizona House passed HB2005, which would force both Apple and Google to open their stores to alternative payments, sending it to the Senate where the lobbying fight moved.
The scope is what makes this story more than an Arizona skirmish: the WSJ had already reported Apple and Google jointly hiring lobbyists across Arizona, Maryland, Virginia, and Texas, and a later Markup investigation found the big-five platforms running a coordinated campaign in 31 states against data privacy legislation. The app store fight is the clearest case study of the machine Apple has since applied to everything from privacy bills to social-issue legislation in Iowa, Texas, and Florida.
First-order effects
- Developers backing the five named bills face their narrowest window yet: with HB2005 already through the Arizona House, Apple's retained lobbyists — including the governor's former chief of staff — are working the Senate committees that now decide whether third-party payment rights survive.
Second-order effects
- Google shares the target rather than free-rides: because HB2005 and its sister bills bind both stores, Google must run its own defensive lobbying or risk Apple's exemptions arriving without its input.
- Every win for Apple's state playbook lowers the marginal cost for rivals to replicate it — the WSJ reporting shows the companies pooling lobbyist hires across multiple states, turning individual bill fights into shared infrastructure.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, app store economics get decided jurisdiction by jurisdiction instead of by any single regulator: Apple can defend its commission model in fifty separate capitols, while a single state victory forces a choice between fragmented per-state payment rules and a nationwide change.
- The apparatus built for these five bills is reusable — the same coalition later fought privacy legislation across 31 states — suggesting state legislatures become the default venue where platform business models are contested.
The trend: Big Tech's regulatory defense is migrating from Washington to state capitols, with Apple treating app store commissions as a franchise worth staffing lobbyist networks in every legislature that threatens them.