Apple is suing Epic Games: Why do we need them? Apple will have to defend itself against the DOJ, Garland, Schiller and Cook
Apple said in an email that it will fight the lawsuit because it believes it is wrong. Something it will have to defend against, though, are the words of its own executives.
It has been a point of contention for a long time. The company was sued by developer Epic Games over its fees for in-app purchases and restrictiveness. The App Store is a focal point of the suit, a key component of the allegedly anticompetitive “moat” the company has built around its products.
Antitrust enforcement is a focus of the Biden administration. The White House created a competition council and an executive order to encourage stronger enforcement of antitrust laws. “Polls show that the public is truly concerned that the federal government should do more about the power of monopolies in order to make the economy more fair and competitive,” Timothy Wu, former special assistant to the president for technology and competition, said in a speech in November 2021.
“Over the last two decades Apple has become one of the most successful companies in the world,” US attorney general Merrick Garland said in a press conference Thursday morning, noting that the company is bigger than the individual GDP of more than 100 countries. Garland claims that Apple deliberately deprives quality and security for its users to maintain its hold on the market.
The DOJ claims that surveys have come to the same conclusion, that the devices of their phones deters them from going to a newer operating system.
The Apple Watch didn’t turn into a blockbuster like the iPhone, but the DOJ suit quotes an executive’s email to allege that the company used the device to exert leverage on its smartphone customers. The suit states that Apple wrote on the Apple watch that the device might prevent customers from moving to another device.
Frustration from some users about Apple’s control of iMessage and confinement of messages from people outside Apple’s ecosystem inside green bubbles has grown since. Last November Apple signaled it was ready to make some concessions, saying it would add compatibility with the RCS messaging standard to iMessage. Apple has argued in the past that iMessages security features are a cause for concern with the DOJ.
In March 2016, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing—apparently Phil Schiller—is said to have looped in CEO Tim Cook on a similar discussion, forwarding an email that said “moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us.”
The DOJ Adversarial Observation of an Apple CEO Switching to iPhone vs. Blackberry in an Open Source OS
The DOJ alleges that the episode demonstrates an early instance of Apple using a playbook it has turned to repeatedly when facing competition, intentionally locking users and developers into Apple’s ecosystem. The lawsuit claims that practice has made switching to Apple alternatives more expensive than it’s worth, deterring competition.
The suit portrays this ad as triggering concern inside Apple. The executive wrote to Jobs, and he said it is easy to switch from iPhone to phone running the open source OS. It’s not very fun to watch. The suit says Jobs wrote that Apple would force developers to use its payment system in order to keep both users and users on its platform.
The DOJ’s complaint opens by quoting an email exchange from 2010 between Apple cofounder and then CEO Steve Jobs and an unnamed “top Apple executive.” It describes an email Jobs received from an executive about an ad for the Kindle e- reader that a woman could use to read books on her iPad, but not on her phone.