Kanter said the lawsuit explains “the illegal and exclusionary conduct that Apple has engaged in is not necessary to protect security and privacy.” To the contrary, “in many instances, Apple’s conduct has made its ecosystem less private and less secure.”
“When you have an institution with a lot of resources, that in our view is harming the American economy and the American people, it’s important for us to allocate our resources to protect the American people,” Garland said. “And that is certainly the case where individual Americans have no ability to protect themselves.”
“Apple has long relied on contractual restrictions rather than competition on the merits to fortify its monopoly power,” Kanter said. He pointed to emails between an Apple executive and then-CEO Steve Jobs in 2010, lamenting a Kindle ad where a user switches seamlessly between the Kindle app on an iPhone and an Android.
Apple was a “significant beneficiary” of the DOJ’s suit against Microsoft more than 20 years ago, said Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division. “The remedy paved the way for Apple to launch iTunes, iPod and eventually the iPhone.”
He described the new suit as a way “to protect competition and innovation for the next generation of technology.”
The new complaint “alleges that Apple has engaged in many of the same tactics that Microsoft used,” Acting Associate Attorney General Benjamin Mizer said, referencing the DOJ’s landmark antitrust case at the turn of the century.
Apple has “smothered an entire industry” by shifting from “revolutionizing the smartphone market to stalling its advancement,” according to Lisa Monaco.
Garland described how Apple “inserts itself into the process” of transactions through its digital wallets, when consumers may “prefer to share that information solely with their bank.”
“That is just one way in which Apple is willing to make the iPhone less secure and less private, in order to maintain its monopoly power,” Garland said.
