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Apple Bans AI Nudify Apps, the FAA Rules on Musk's Flying Car, and Carriers Charge $10 for a Software Feature
Apple moved to close a gap in its App Store policies by explicitly targeting AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery — so-called nudify applications that had occupied a gray zone because existing rules addressed explicit content without specifically accounting for AI-generated imagery as a distinct category. The update aligns Apple's platform rules with laws in several states, including California and Texas, that now specifically criminalize such imagery, reducing the company's legal exposure. The enforcement challenge remains: Apple's store contains approximately 1.8 million apps, and new variants of prohibited applications can look meaningfully different from the policy language written to catch them.
The Federal Aviation Administration ruled this week that Tesla's flying Roadster — a production car fitted with rocket thrusters designed to perform controlled jumps and potentially short-distance flight — does not meet the federal definition of an aircraft. The FAA's statutory definition requires a vehicle to be used for the purpose of flight in air; the Roadster's ballistic-hop design appears to fall outside that framework, placing it in a regulatory no-man's land between FAA jurisdiction and the less demanding standards of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The ruling is not necessarily final: if the vehicle evolves to demonstrate sustained controlled flight, the FAA's analysis may change. Sam Altman publicly praised the project, a gesture of rare collegial détente between two figures whose legal disputes over OpenAI's structure were public through 2025.
Verizon announced it will charge $10 a month for access to iPhone Handoff under iOS 27 — a feature that allows a single phone number to operate across two iPhones. T-Mobile is pricing the same capability at $5. The feature is a software function built by Apple; carriers are monetizing their network routing for it at margins that far exceed their underlying costs. The pricing differential illustrates the practical limits of competition in a market where three carriers divide hundreds of millions of subscribers facing high switching costs. Verizon charging double T-Mobile's price for an identical feature reflects each company's assessment of how price-sensitive its own customer base is — not the result of dramatically different infrastructure costs.
The carrier pricing situation illuminates a broader point about antitrust law that often surfaces in discussions of platform and telecom markets. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 prohibits contracts or combinations that restrain trade, and monopolization achieved through exclusionary conduct — not mere size or pricing power. Courts have consistently held that having a large market share is not itself a violation; what matters is whether a company has used anti-competitive behavior to acquire or maintain that position. Verizon charging more than T-Mobile for the same feature is not automatically an antitrust violation — it is, potentially, simply pricing. The distinction matters enormously, and critics of large technology and telecom companies frequently discover how narrow antitrust law's actual scope is when cases reach the courts.
Sanctions, Antitrust, and the Architecture of Unchecked Executive Power
The Reuters allegation about U.S. sanctions being pushed for electoral benefit in Brazil raises a question that deserves a structural answer: how does the United States actually decide who gets sanctioned, and what legal framework governs that power? The short answer is that it is far less constrained than many listeners might assume.
A comparison to antitrust law illuminates the gap. Antitrust enforcement in the U.S. rests primarily on the Sherman Act of 1890. Section 1 of the Act prohibits contracts or conspiracies in restraint of trade — collusion between competitors. Section 2 prohibits monopolization, though simply holding a monopoly is not, by itself, illegal under U.S. law. The legal standard for monopolization requires two showings: first, that the company holds monopoly power in a relevant market — typically defined as a market share above roughly 70%, though no bright-line rule exists — and second, that the company acquired or maintained that power through exclusionary conduct designed to prevent competitors from participating, rather than through vigorous competition alone. Critically, antitrust enforcement is subject to judicial oversight: the DOJ or FTC must bring a case, a court must evaluate it against evidentiary standards, and the process is subject to appeal.
Sanctions work differently. The President holds broad authority under statutes including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — IEEPA — to designate individuals and entities, freeze assets, and impose trade restrictions, with relatively limited judicial review. That discretion is enormously powerful, and it operates with far fewer institutional checks than antitrust enforcement. If sanctions designations were being shaped — as Reuters reports — to disadvantage Lula-aligned figures during a foreign election campaign, the legal framework provides little of the procedural protection that antitrust law builds in. The distinction is blunt: antitrust has courts; sanctions have presidents. Which of those constraints proves more durable depends heavily on who occupies the Oval Office.