When Apple pulled ICEBlock off its app store Thursday, it wasn’t just taking down a controversial app.
It was showing Americans what the rest of the world already knows: A handful of huge tech companies control the choke points of modern life — and when governments lean on Big Tech, they can use those choke points themselves.
For years, this was a mostly theoretical problem, or at worst, a developer gripe about App Store fees. The stakes were commercial, not civic.
But in 2025, the US government has twice pressed tech gatekeepers into service — first with TikTok, now with ICEBlock — and each time they complied.
We call this censorship when Beijing, Riyadh, or Moscow do it. Now it’s happening here.
I’m not surprised Attorney General Pam Bondi was eager to take credit for pushing ICEBlock out of the store. The government has complained about the app, which lets users post sightings of ICE officers on a crowd-sourced map, since it launched earlier this year.
And while developer Joshua Aaron has insisted he didn’t build ICEBlock to obstruct ICE, the intent is obvious, starting with the name: It’s designed to make ICE’s job harder.
That raises the question: Why ICEBlock, but not other apps that also frustrate law enforcement? Google Maps, for instance, still lets me flag a cop car on the highway — a feature officers have objected to for years. If that’s acceptable, why not this?
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Until recently, app store disputes in the US were mostly corporate spats — Spotify and Epic vs. Apple — about money and esoteric ideas like sideloading. Important in policy circles, abstract for normals.
TikTok changed that. Lawmakers ordered the app to find non-Chinese owners or shut down. When it didn’t, Apple and Google removed TikTok — and only restored it weeks later, after Bondi’s office sent them letters promising they wouldn’t be punished for ignoring the law.
Now Bondi has gone a step further, ordering Apple to cut off an app made by a developer in Texas (if you’ve already downloaded ICEBlock to your iPhone, it will continue to work there, but it will be essentially impossible for Aaron to update the app).
This is the kind of behavior Americans usually associate with other countries. Saudi Arabia leaned on Netflix to drop a Hasan Minhaj episode critical of its rulers. Russia forced Apple to remove Radio Free Europe’s app. And in 2019, China pushed Apple to kill a Hong Kong protest app. At the time, US lawmakers — including Republicans Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and Tom Cotton — loudly objected.
American conservatives have spent years saying Big Tech censors them — sometimes at the government’s behest. I don’t think most of those complaints hold up — and recent forced confessions from Meta and Google about Biden-era jawboning don’t persuade me.
But partisanship aside, conservatives are right about one thing: Big Tech really is a gatekeeper. And right now, the US government is learning just how useful those gatekeepers can be.
Where do we go next? Almost certainly, Washington will try it again. Once you’ve discovered you can make Apple or Google do your bidding, why stop? That bell is hard to un-ring.