The US Department of Justice and 16 state and district attorneys general accused Apple of operating an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market in a new antitrust lawsuit. The DOJ and states are accusing Apple of driving up prices for consumers and developers at the expense of making users more reliant on its iPhones.
Those are tough to disentangle, could they make money by having a cross platform messaging app and charging for it? Yes. Is that more or less than the money apple predicts they make by making it exclusive, luring/keeping others to/on iphone? I would like to believe apple’s internal conversation represents how they view things more than the government saying it would benefit them to open it up.
I definitely think they have weaker and stronger items in here.
Monopoly isn’t illegal the DOJ says. Abuse of monopoly power is. We can all discuss what constitutes a monopoly but I’m putting my money on the DOJ’s definition and interpretation of that definition actually holding water vs. common conception.
I find the most compelling things in their suit to be things that don’t really have a technical reason but a competition limiting one, like:
denying third party devices access to APIs that apple devices can access (e.g. no texting replies from anything but an apple watch)
restricting use of NFC/tap to pay to apple wallet which then requires any financial institution use it instead of making their own app -and apple charges for it of course (0.15%, they apparently made 200 billion USD off of this in some specified time period)
permissions for apples own apps are treated differently than for third party apps (you can’t restrict permissions on core apps for some things I guess - this is second/third hand reading for me from other sources)
That sort of stuff. It’s like, if you allow interoperability/third party access (i.e. a marketplace) then you’re obliged to keep it fair if you’re of a certain size/power.
I don’t see those examples being able to withstand scrutiny. Apples lawyers will find some way the speech to text api for wearables isn’t good enough for third party use, point out how all those other financial institutions have had high profile breaches but apple wallet hasn’t and that they can’t be expected to develop their own native software using clean room processes and the court will order them to let people text on pebble and throw everything else out.
Remember that the legal framework differentiating apples walled garden ecosystem from a free market was established about ten years ago around these precise concerns. This is already largely settled law, what’s up to decide seems to be the exact extent of it.