United States Says Apple Is an Illegal Monopoly

howtogeek.com:

The European Union has targeted Apple over the past few years for monopolistic and anti-competitive practices, forcing the company to allow alternate app stores and other features in the EU. Now, the United States government is suing Apple on similar grounds.

The United States Department of Justice (DoJ), along with 16 state and district attorneys general, is suing Apple over alleged anticompetitive practices. The complaint explains, “Rather than respond to competitive threats by offering lower smartphone prices to consumers or better monetization for developers, Apple would meet competitive threats by imposing a series of shapeshifting rules and restrictions in its App Store guidelines and developer agreements that would allow Apple to extract higher fees, thwart innovation, offer a less secure or degraded user experience, and throttle competitive alternatives.”

There are five core complaints in the lawsuit. First, Apple is accused of blocking “super apps,” which are defined as apps that are collections of smaller apps and games. The DoJ didn’t name specific examples here, but presumably this is about apps like WeChat in China, which contain the features of dozens of separate apps and can be highly lucrative for companies. Second, Apple prevented cloud streaming games and apps from the App Store (which only changed in January). Third, Apple makes third-party messaging apps worse than iMessage by blocking them from sending and receiving SMS messages in the same way. Fourth, Apple limits the functionality of smartwatches connected to an iPhone compared to the features available from an Apple Watch. Finally, Apple doesn’t allow people to use alternative digital wallets in place of Apple Wallet.

The issues described in the lawsuit are similar to the complaints raised by the European Union, which led to the group of 27 countries passing the Digital Markets Act in 2022. That forced Apple, Microsoft, and other large tech companies to make some product integrations