Justice Department sues Apple, alleging it illegally monopolized the smartphone market

FILE – The Apple logo is shown on a screen during an announcement on the Apple campus Sept. 12, 2023, in Cupertino, Calif. The Justice Department announced a sweeping antitrust lawsuit Thursday, March 21, 2024 against Apple, accusing the tech giant of having an illegal monopoly over smartphones in the U.S.

“Apple has locked its consumers into the iPhone while locking its competitors out of the market,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. Stalling the advancement of the very market it revolutionized, she said, it has “smothered an entire industry.” It specifically seeks to stop Apple from undermining technologies that compete with its own apps — in areas including streaming, messaging and digital payments — and prevent it from continuing to craft contracts with developers, accessory makers and consumers that let it “obtain, maintain, extend or entrench a monopoly.”

“It’s a really big deal to go up and punch someone who is acting like a bully and pretending not to be a bully,” she said. Apple said the lawsuit, if successful, would “hinder our ability to create the kind of technology people expect from Apple — where hardware, software, and services intersect” and would “set a dangerous precedent, empowering government to take a heavy hand in designing people’s technology.”

The lawsuit complains that Apple charges as much as $1,599 for an iPhone and that the high margins it earns on each is more than double what others in the industry get. And when users run an internet search, Google gives Apple a “significant cut” of the advertising revenue those searches generate.Critics of Apple’s anticompetitive practices have long complained that it’s claim to prioritize user privacy is hypocritical when profits are at stake.

However, prominent critic Cory Doctorow has complained that while Apple has blocked entities like Facebook from spying on its users it runs its “own surveillance advertising empire” that gathers the same kinds of personal data but for its own use.

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Justice Department and states accuse Apple of wielding a smartphone monopoly through market manipulationThe civil complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, alleges the company has illegally wielded a monopoly over the smartphone market by cutting off developers and stifling competitors with punitive restrictions.
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