Fortnite maker Epic Games has been at war with Apple since 2020, protesting the 30 per cent cut of revenue that Apple demands for all in-app transactions on the iOS platform. Epic argues that because it has its own app store, users should have the freedom to choose where they buy Epic’s products no matter what platform they decide to game on.Dado Ruvic/Reuters

Keldon Bester is the executive director of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project and a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. He has worked as a special adviser at the Competition Bureau.

Last week, Apple AAPL-Q decided it had had enough. Reversing an earlier decision, Apple deleted the developer account of Epic Games, maker of the ultrapopular Fortnite video game franchise.

It’s reason for doing so? Disparaging tweets from Epic’s chief executive officer, Tim Sweeney.

Under pressure, Apple later reinstated Epic Games’s account. But the whole episode speaks to something disturbing: the nature of the bully-based economy, where a single company can shut off access to a multimillion-dollar sales channel because one CEO was rude to another.

Epic was using its developer account to create a version of its own app store, the Epic Games Store, within Apple’s iOS operating system environment. That it was able to do so at all was the result of the European........

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