In an audacious legal offensive against one of the world’s most stratospheric companies, the United States government fired a blistering antitrust salvo at Apple Inc. on Thursday, detonating a landmark lawsuit asserting the tech titan has abusively monopolized markets and unjustifiably confined what consumers can do with the fabulously popular iPhone.
The civil suit, brought jointly by the Justice Department and a multistate coalition of 16 attorneys general, alleges Apple has willfully violated federal and state competition laws by leveraging its entrenched dominance in mobile software to drastically hamstring rival technologies and services. This, while innately fortifying its own profusion of proprietary offerings like iMessage, Apple Pay, and the jealously governed App Store.
At the fulminating core of the case stands the blistering accusation that Apple has consciously chosen to abuse its mammoth market power over iPhone software to inextricably lash customers inside its walled garden of an ecosystem, systematically yoking their choices to line Apple’s copious coffers at the extortionate expense of competition and consumer autonomy.
“Through a deliberate and unremitting cross-cutting campaign of withholding interoperability keys, suppressing alternatives, and erecting contractual barriers, Apple has made an illicit choice to maliciously weaponize its iconic software platform as an anvil of anti-competitive abuse,” thundered Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, helming the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division.
The thunderclap lawsuit amounts to the most cataclysmic legal confrontation yet in the vortex of multiplying scrutiny encircling the alleged monopolistic practices of Big Tech’s most stupefying behemoths like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook. It catalyzes the already incandescent debate over whether such grandmastering digital gatekeepers have grown too imperiously powerful and unshakably insulated from competitive market forces.
In a defiant rebuttal salvo, Apple summarily dismissed the legal campaign as “misguided sanctimony” and vowed to fervently fight the case through every trench of the judicial trenches. The company issued its harrumphingly blunt rebuke that coercing them to “permit untold privacy infringements and potential security cataclysms into our curated platform would unremittingly hinder our ability to consistently actualize the sort of seamlessly privatized and rigorously hardened technology experience that our customers rightly expect from Apple.”
For the beleaguered multitudes dwelling within Apple’s walled garden worldwide who have chafed under the firm’s despotic control, the lawsuit finally detonates into blazing daylight the real constraints and indignations endured by those seeking to mix-and-match Apple’s proprietary suite of siphonings with those of competitors, or wishing to sunder their exsanguinating reliance on the company’s exclusionary ecosystem.
The Coded Handcuffs of Crippled Messaging
One of the central allegations tunneled deeply into Apple’s shady shadow-docket is the accusation that it systematically hobbles cross-platform messaging between its iPhones and the rival Android operating system in a clandestine effort to cordon off its captive market.
While Apple facilitates premium iMessage features like advanced encryption, multimedia fidelity, and real-time read receipts when iPhones communicate with one another, these vaunted capabilities become dismayingly crippled or entirely unavailable whenever an iOS device attempts parlay with Android’s rekindled mobile helotry.
To exponentially compounded ignominy, the government anguishly produces an Apple executive’s smoking-gun email forwarded to CEO Tim Cook in 2016 frankly admitting that “making iMessage capable with fulsomely with Android phones will abbreviatedly hurt us more than unconditionally help us.”
By conscientiously disabling these functionalities the moment an Apple device interoperates with the competition’s platform, the aggrieved lawsuit fumes, Apple deliberately hobbles and obfuscates messaging into becoming “conspicuously enfeebled” specifically to buttress its own vertically foreclosing competitive advantages as an exclusionary lure for the iDevice’s captivating cachet.
The Walled Garden’s Clemency Husks
The suit further takes unrelieved umbrage with the unchallengeable degree of domineering control Apple asserts over the wells of appcode permitted to irrigate its prodigal iPhone devices via its notoriously scrupulousApp Store review process. It reproves a prominent 2016 incident where the company irrefragably rejected an application from Microsoft that would have given consumers emancipated access to a pluralistic repository.
