>The app store is, at its heart, an enabler of totalitarianism. The first link of the chain is forged from the freedom to own your computer for marginal profits, but the rest are forged from your human rights.
1. Practically speaking, those restrictions are trivially bypassed by changing the region on your apple account, or using an alt account for app store. Yes, this presents a hurdle, but given that any serious totalitarian regime would probably also be implementing network-level blocks for such services and you'd need VPNs to bypass those, I don't think this materially changes availability of those apps.
2. Apple is doing those things because they have to comply with local laws. Would you rather have multinationals flout local laws? Or only when it suits your politics? What makes one country's laws more legitimate than another? Some of the hate speech/defamation laws in European countries are arguably pretty draconian as well. Should Apple, being an American company, push American notions of free speech to European countries?
1. Practically speaking, those restrictions are trivially bypassed by changing the region on your apple account, or using an alt account for app store. Yes, this presents a hurdle, but given that any serious totalitarian regime would probably also be implementing network-level blocks for such services and you'd need VPNs to bypass those, I don't think this materially changes availability of those apps.
2. Apple is doing those things because they have to comply with local laws. Would you rather have multinationals flout local laws? Or only when it suits your politics? What makes one country's laws more legitimate than another? Some of the hate speech/defamation laws in European countries are arguably pretty draconian as well. Should Apple, being an American company, push American notions of free speech to European countries?