In the center, the Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland, in Washington, Thursday March 21. JOSE LUIS MAGANA / AP
Apple is in the crosshairs of the authorities. The Department of Justice and sixteen American states filed a complaint against the iPhone manufacturer on Thursday March 21 in a New Jersey court. The group is accused of violating antitrust laws guaranteeing competition and of maintaining “monopolistic” power in the smartphone market thanks to “multiple and constant illegal practices”. The legal angle of attack is quite broad: it aims to criticize the company for favoring the devices in its ecosystem, by preventing its competitors from using certain hardware and software elements.
As this announcement shows, Apple is now at the forefront of companies in the sights of governments and competition authorities. According to the Bloomberg agency, the European Commission could, “in the coming days”, announce the opening of a sanction procedure against the manufacturer, for failure to apply the regulation on Digital Markets Act (DMA) platforms. . The action could also concern Google or even Meta.
In 2015, Google was the first of the digital giants to be the subject of competition investigations in Brussels, then Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) was targeted by procedures from both sides of the Atlantic, as well as Amazon.
“Higher prices”
Concretely, the complaint filed Thursday accuses Apple of having created a form of “walled garden” around its software and devices such as the iPhone, Mac computers, iPad tablets or Apple Watches. The manufacturer would limit the possibility for users to insert competing products into this ecosystem and, therefore, prevent them from changing universe to join that of rivals like Android, which offer other services and machines. This amounts, according to the complaint, to artificially maintaining Apple's dominance and imposing “higher prices” on consumers – a crucial point in American competition law.
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Among the practices criticized by the iPhone manufacturer is the fact of preventing its users from communicating through its iMessage messaging with owners of competing smartphones: blue messages are replaced by green messages using the more basic SMS technology .
Apple would also make it much easier to integrate its Apple Watch into its mobile world than competing watches. The group also favors, according to the accusation, its Wallet wallet, the only financial application authorized to use the iPhone antenna allowing contactless payment. The company also encourages banks and other services to integrate into Wallet.
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