With its lawsuit against Apple, the Justice Department focuses on outdated issues and irrelevant points, missing an opportunity to address more pressing concerns, Bloomberg reported.
According to Bloomberg, despite the friendly image that Apple Inc. cultivates, it’s a hard-driving company behind the scenes. Just ask the many suppliers that Apple has abruptly dropped or the app developers it has put out of business.
Apple also hasn’t been one to welcome openness or competition. It refused to bring its iMessage app to Android phones and only agreed to adopt the cross-platform RCS messaging system under mounting pressure. Apple makes developers use its in-app purchase system, shuns cloud-gaming services, and has been reluctant to open up its tap-to-pay chip to outside apps — all because it wants to protect its kingdom from rivals.
That’s provided the U.S. Department of Justice with plenty of fodder for its antitrust lawsuit, which was filed on Thursday. But the case relies mostly on outdated arguments and cites problems that Apple is already resolving. It even levels the dubious claim that Apple makes its products worse in order to harm rivals.
Bloomberg reported: Here are the five main issues that the Justice Department is hanging its hat on:
- Apple has hindered the development of “super apps,” software like WeChat in China that includes several mini apps.
- The company hasn’t supported cloud streaming game services, which run off a data center and can be delivered to the iPhone for playback.
- Apple has barred third-party texting apps on the iPhone from sending SMS messages, and its own messaging software doesn’t work on Android.
- There’s a lack of support on the iPhone for third-party smartwatches, including the ability to get some notifications.
- Apple doesn’t let third-party apps use its tap-to-pay technology to make in-person payments.
Impending innovation. Reducing consumer choice. Extending dominance to other markets. These are accusations that the Justice Department leveled against a technology giant it accused of running an illegal monopoly. But they aren’t from this week’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple — they’re from the case the department brought against Microsoft in 1998, The New York Times reported.
The move against Apple is, along with the Justice Department’s 2020 lawsuit against Google over search, perhaps the most ambitious tech antitrust battle since the Clinton administration’s effort to open up Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
And federal prosecutors are explicitly connecting the Apple lawsuit to that earlier fight.
According to the New York Times, the Justice Department sees a direct connection between the two cases. “Microsoft” appears 26 times in the Apple complaint. And prosecutors say Apple wouldn’t have achieved its current towering success had it not been for the government’s fight against Microsoft:
“The iPod did not achieve widespread adoption until Apple developed a cross-platform version of the iPod and iTunes for Microsoft’s Windows operating system, at the time, the dominant operating system for personal computers. In the absence of the consent decree in United States v. Microsoft, it would have been more difficult for Apple to achieve this success and ultimately launch the iPhone.”
In my opinion, it seems like the Department of Justice is very interested in going after Apple. And now, we wait and see what happens.