A coalition of conservative and libertarian organizations on Thursday sent a letter to the Justice Department (DOJ), voicing support for its antitrust suit against Apple.
The DOJ, along with 16 attorneys general and the District of Columbia, filed a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Apple on Thursday, alleging that the company unlawfully monopolized the smartphone market in the United States.
Breitbart News found five key arguments in the suit:
- Apple maintains a “walled garden” with the iPhone and its app store
- Apple controls app distribution and suppresses “super apps”
- Apple degrades the functionality of its third-party messaging apps to impede cross-platform communication and reinforce the “green bubble” stigma with non-iPhone devices
- Apple limits non-Apple Watch smartwatch compatibility with the iPhone
- Apple CarPlay has been taking over the automobile industry
The coalition on Thursday said that Apple “has been the most egregious in exploiting its dominance to hamper the free market” among the other big tech companies.
The groups wrote that in addition to stifling free speech and undermining competitors, Apple:
…has built deep economic ties with the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party (CCP), leveraging their closed ecosystem to facilitate the CCP’s human rights abuses. For years, conservatives have sounded the alarm on Apple’s discrimination against rival platforms, including alternative technology companies favored by many consumers. In 2019, the DOJ under President Trump launched an antitrust probe into Apple’s anti-competitive conduct, which has only become more egregious in the years that followed. Most recently, Republican Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr called on this agency to look into Apple’s anti- competitive behaviors and noted that it is the “single choke point” over the mobile ecosystem.
Apple’s discrimination against messaging app Beeper Mini—an application that allowed non-iOS users to access iMessage from Android phones—shows that the company is unwilling to deviate from this behavior on its own accord. Though Apple has cynically weaponized “user security” concerns to deflect from antitrust scrutiny, the company’s treatment of Beeper Mini exposes this line of defense as a farce. In December 2023, Apple delisted Beeper Mini from the App Store. The controversy surrounding iMessage-only “blue-bubbles” versus “green-bubbles” from non-Apple devices is not an aesthetic issue: as it stands, “green-bubble” messages are not afforded encryption like texts sent through iMessage are. Beeper Mini aimed to extend that security to Android users to ensure that all consumers’ messages were protected from unwanted peering eyes. Leveraging control of the App Store to destroy a company that aimed to give more choices to mobile phone users is a clear-cut monopolistic abuse. [Emphasis added]
The groups noted that Apple’s App Store has “harmed” free speech and competition with an “exorbitant” 30 percent commission fee on large app developers and even delisted alternative free speech platforms such as Parler.
The coalition concluded:
Apple has proven unwilling to make changes to its monopolistic business model in good faith, and competitors and consumers alike continue to pay the price. As Apple works to expand its monopoly into sectors like virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), and the auto industry, holding the company accountable for its malfeasance is more important than ever. This is especially true when the company is contemplating allowing Google’s Gemini— Google’s primary competitor in AI and the app store market—to power the iPhone’s AI features.
Conservative Letter DOJ_Apple by Breitbart News on Scribd
The conservative and libertarian coalition is made up of the following members:
- Roslyn Layton, cofounder of China Tech Threat
- The Digital First Project
- Ryan Williams, president of the Claremont Institute
- Adam Candeub, senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America
- Ziven Havens, policy director at the Bull Moose Project
- Zach Graves, executive director at the Foundation for American Innovation
- Mike Davis, president of the Internet Accountability Project
- Rachel Bovard
- Mark A. DiPlacido, policy adviser at American Compass
- Geoffrey Cain, policy director at the Tech Integrity Project
- Matthew Peterson, editor-in-chief at Blaze Media
- Julius Krein, editor at American Affairs
- Clare Morell, senior policy analyst at the Ethics & Public Policy Center
- Mark Meador, visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
