Tim Cook is facing the most challenging moments in Apple’s recent history. After being accused by Epic, Meta, and Microsoft, now the United States Government itself is going against the Cupertino company.
In a new antitrust lawsuit, the US Department of Justice and 16 state attorneys general accuse Apple of exercising an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market.
The Department of Justice and the states accuse Apple of raising prices for consumers and developers at the expense of users becoming more dependent on their iPhones. And it alleges that Apple “selectively” imposes contractual restrictions on developers and retains critical forms of access to the phone, according to a statement.
What is the Biden Government accusing Apple of?
“Apple exercises its monopoly power to extract more money from consumers, developers, content creators, artists, publishers, small businesses, and merchants, among others,” wrote the Department of Justice of the White House in a press release.
The government points out several different ways in which Apple has allegedly illegally maintained its monopoly:
- Interrupting “super apps” that encompass many different programs and that could degrade the “stickiness of iOS” and make it easier for iPhone users to switch to competing devices.
- Blocking cloud streaming applications for things like video games, which would reduce the need for superior hardware.
- Suppressing messaging quality between the iPhone platform and competing mobile platforms like Android.
- Limiting the functionality of third-party smartwatches with their iPhones and making it difficult for Apple Watch users to switch iPhones due to compatibility issues.
- Preventing third-party developers from creating competing digital wallets for the iPhone with “tap to pay” functionality.
Apple is the second tech giant that the Department of Justice has faced in recent years, after filing two antitrust lawsuits against Google in the last two administrations.
This way, a long drought of technology monopoly cases is reversed since the historic lawsuit against Microsoft in the early 2000s. The case has been years in the making, with reports first emerging in June 2019 that the DOJ would handle the company’s antitrust investigations.
