WASHINGTON, DC — Today, The Tech Oversight Project issued the following statement on the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Apple, alleging multiple violations that illegally block competition on smartphone devices.
“The Department of Justice’s complaint makes one thing crystal clear: Apple has built a moat around its smartphone monopoly that increases prices and stifles innovation. The company willfully breaks the law – to the detriment of its customers – by degrading its own product’s connectivity, extracting monopoly rents in the form of a 30% commission from app makers, ensuring that only Apple has access to key phone components, and self-preferencing its own products and apps while limiting and controlling their competitors’ ability to innovate, or blocking them from entering the space altogether,” said Sacha Haworth, Executive Director of the Tech Oversight Project. “Apple and its army of lobbyists will make claims about security, but at the end of the day, these are red herring arguments belying the fact that Apple devised a scheme to enrich itself at the expense of Americans. We applaud the Department of Justice and the Biden Administration for taking this historic step to protect the American people and create a better digital economy.”
Read the full DOJ complaint here.