The Strait Has a Contract
Borrowing John Thornhill’s Apple metaphor, and grounding it in two hundred pages of legal English.
In a piece for the Middle East Monitor on May 3, Karam Nama borrowed an analogy from the Financial Times’ John Thornhill: Apple is the digital Strait of Hormuz. Not a waterway, but a chokepoint. Not the source of the oil, but the passage through which it must flow.
The metaphor lands. It lands harder if you’ve spent any time inside the contract that runs the strait.
I have been writing a clause-by-clause series on the Apple Developer Program License Agreement. Most of those pieces look at one obligation, one liability shift, one definitional move. This piece is different. It is about the shape of the whole document, and what that shape means.
The shape is a strait.
Apple does not need to be first. Apple needs to be the gate.
Thornhill’s argument, distilled by Nama, is that power in the AI era is not invention. It is access. Models proliferate. Capabilities multiply. Foundation labs raise eye-watering rounds. None of it reaches a user without crossing a screen, and the screen, for billions of people, is governed by Apple.
“Apple does not need to dominate AI research to dominate its distribution.”
That sentence, from Nama’s piece, is not a description of Apple’s market position. It is a description of the Apple Developer Program License Agreement.
The DPLA exists to enforce one bright line: software runs on Apple devices on Apple’s terms or it does not run at all. Section 7.6, titled “No Other Distribution Authorized Under this Agreement,” reads in part:
“In the absence of a separate agreement with Apple, You agree not to distribute Your Application for iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, visionOS, or watchOS to third parties via other distribution methods or to enable or permit others to do so.”
That is the strait, written down. 2.5 billion active devices on one side, every developer in the world on the other, and a single sentence of legal English between them.
Every clause is a tollbooth.
If section 7.6 is the strait, the rest of the agreement is the geography of it.
3.3.1(B) is the clause Apple invoked against Replit and Vibecode. It governs what kind of software can run inside other software, and Apple used it to slow down vibe coding platforms before they could become parallel app stores.
3.3.4(iv) is the malware clause. It pushes liability for harmful or unstable code down onto the developer, regardless of how the code was generated. The AI generation question is unsettled.
3.3.4(v) is the FOSS clause. It refuses GPL-style copyleft obligations from contaminating Apple’s distribution. If your dependency tree includes a license Apple does not like, the strait is closed to you.
3.3.4A is the content layer. Music rights, objectionable content, age verification, sensitive content scanning. Each one a separate kiosk in the same building.
3.3.3(N) shifts identity verification liability onto developers who use Apple’s ID Verifier APIs.
App Store guideline 3.2f governs fraud detection and permanent termination. One enforcement event closes the strait to your developer account, forever.
I could keep going. The series will keep going. The point of listing them like this is to make a structural argument that no single clause can make on its own: every clause in the DPLA is a tollbooth, and every tollbooth is positioned at a different point along the same strait.
Some are about money. Most are not. Most are about permission.
The Hormuz tax is not a metaphor. It has a number.
Thornhill calls it the Hormuz tax in the metaphorical register. In the actual contract, it has a name and a number.
The In-App Purchase API, governed by Schedule 2 of the DPLA, takes a percentage of every digital transaction inside an app distributed through the App Store. Thirty percent for most developers, fifteen percent for small businesses and second-year subscriptions. There are corners and exceptions, but the structural fact is simple: if your AI service charges a user through an iOS app, Apple gets a cut.
This is the most visible part of the strait, and the part that has drawn the most regulatory attention. The European Digital Markets Act. The Epic Games litigation. The South Korean alternative payment law. All of them aimed at this one tollbooth.
None of them, so far, has redrawn the coastline.
Developers stop thinking about what is possible.
This is the move in Nama’s piece I keep coming back to. He argues that when one company becomes the passage, developers stop asking what is possible and start asking what is permitted. Creativity becomes negotiation, not invention.
That is the actual cost of the strait, and it does not show up on a balance sheet.
It shows up in the Replit team rewriting their architecture to satisfy a clause. It shows up in vibe coding founders reading the App Review Guidelines before they read their own product roadmap. It shows up every time a developer with a working idea looks at the DPLA and decides not to build the thing.
The series I am writing is, at its core, an attempt to map that constraint clause by clause. Not because the clauses are interesting in themselves, although they often are. Because the clauses, taken together, define the imaginative perimeter of an entire industry.
Ternus inherits the tollbooth.
I wrote last week about John Ternus taking over as CEO on September 1. The succession is a product-CEO signal, a pivot back toward hardware-led decision making, and probably the closest Apple has come to a Steve Jobs leadership posture since 2011.
It does not change the strait.
Tim Cook becoming Executive Chair and global ambassador, traveling between Brussels and Beijing and Washington, is consistent with this. The strait keeper does not negotiate the strait away. The strait keeper negotiates with the parties trying to redraw it. That is Cook’s next job. Ternus’s job is to keep the device and the developer platform attractive enough that nobody seriously wants to redraw it in the first place.
The contract stays. The signatures change.
Can the strait be broken?
Nama offers two paths, and they are the right two: a technological revolution that changes the device, or regulatory intervention that redistributes power.
Both are circling. Neither has landed.
A new device class, glasses or an ambient AI wearable that does not depend on the iPhone for distribution, would route around the strait the way pipelines once routed around Hormuz. Apple knows this. Apple has its own glasses program. So does everyone else.
Regulatory intervention, especially the DMA in Europe, is changing the texture of the strait at the margins. Sideloading. Alternative payment processors. Third-party browser engines. None of it has reduced Apple’s structural position. Compliance has been technical and grudging, and the toll continues to be collected.
There is a third path Nama does not name. Read the DPLA more carefully. Push back on the clauses that overreach. Make Apple defend each tollbooth on its own terms instead of accepting the whole geography as given.
That is the path this series is on.
Who is allowed to pass?
In the past, knowledge was power. Today, access is power. Apple does not need to be first. Apple needs to be the gate.
Every clause in the Apple Developer Program License Agreement is a stretch of that gate. Some narrow. Some wide. All of them written by Apple, all of them enforceable by Apple, all of them subject to change at Apple’s discretion.
The next piece in this series will go back to a single clause. The clause-level work matters, and it is going to keep mattering, especially as the AI wave runs through every section of the agreement at once.
But the strait is the frame. The strait was always the frame. Thornhill named it. Nama sharpened it. The contract has been writing it down for sixteen years.
The question developers should be asking, every time they sign the DPLA, is the question Nama ends on:
Who is allowed to pass?