Report: US Department of Justice to File Lawsuit Against Apple for Preventing Competitors from Accessing iPhone Features
(Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is preparing to sue Apple as soon as Thursday for allegedly violating antitrust laws by denying competitors access to iPhone hardware and software features, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.
Cracking down on Big Tech has been one of the few ideas on which Democrats and Republicans have agreed. During the Trump administration, which ends in 2021, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched investigations into Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon.
A DoJ spokesman and Apple did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
It’s not clear what the focus of the payments would be, but hardware makers such as smart tracker maker Tile have long complained that Apple has limited the ways they can work with the iPhone’s sensors while developing competing products with greater access.
Apple began selling AirTags — which can be attached to items like car keys so users can find them when they’re lost — several years after Tile sold a similar product.
Similarly, Apple has restricted access to the chip in the iPhone that enables contactless payments. Credit cards can only be added to the iPhone with Apple’s own Apple Pay service.
Apple has long maintained that it restricts third-party developers’ access to some user data and some iPhone hardware for privacy and security reasons.
The iPhone maker has also faced criticism for its iMessage service, which only works on Apple devices. Critics have complained that the company has degraded messages sent to and received from Android phones by shrinking images and videos. Last year, Apple reversed course and announced support for a new RCS messaging technology that Google has touted as a way to make messaging more fluid across different types of devices.
In late February, Bloomberg News had reported that Apple representatives met with Justice Department officials to persuade the agency not to file antitrust charges against the iPhone maker.
The new antitrust lawsuit against Apple would be the Justice Department’s third in 14 years, but it’s the first case in which the iPhone maker has been accused of illegally maintaining its dominant position, Bloomberg reported.
Apple is also in the middle of an antitrust dispute with Epic Games, the maker of the Fortnite video game.
Earlier in the day, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Elon Musk’s X and Match Group joined Epic Games in protesting that Apple has failed to comply with a court-ordered injunction over payments on its lucrative App Store.
The tech giants behind some of the App Store’s most popular apps said Apple “clearly” violated the September 2021 ban by making it harder to steer consumers to a cheaper way to pay for digital content.
Alphabet’s Google has been sued by the Justice Department twice — once under Republican Donald Trump over its search operations and a second time over ad technology after Democratic President Joe Biden took office. The FTC sued Facebook during the Trump administration and Biden’s FTC has moved forward with the lawsuit.
