Policy Backgrounders

Justice Department Sues Apple

March 28, 2024

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The US Department of Justice (DOJ) and a bipartisan group of 16 states brought an antitrust suit against Apple alleging that Apple uses anticompetitive practices to maintain its dominant position in the smartphone market, including by inhibiting competition from third-party developers and from rival devices.

• The suit takes a broad approach across Apple’s business model, alleging an interlocking pattern of illegal behavior that in the Justice Department’s view combines to lock customers (both intermediate market participants such as developers and end-users) into Apple’s ecosystem, limit the growth of competing applications from third-party developers, and degrade quality when services are interoperable across Apple and non-Apple devices.
• The suit adds to a growing wave of antitrust actions DOJ and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have brought focusing on large US tech platforms. The efforts led by FTC Chair Lina Khan and Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Jonathan Kanter seek to expand antirust doctrines on monopoly power to certain behaviors by digital platforms they view as anticompetitive.
• DOJ filed the case in the District of New Jersey, likely because the Third Circuit, of which New Jersey is a part, has a record of support for plaintiffs in antitrust cases.
• While the technology cases are likely to move slowly through the courts, growing alignment between US actions and investigations into Apple, Meta, and Google under the EU’s new Digital Markets Act indicate that the cases could coincide or conclude with orders in either jurisdiction that force the companies to alter their practices, as they have already done in Europe.