So what’s the point of the case? On a broad level, the short story is that Apple used to be wondrous. But monopoly power, as it turns out, has poisoned the firm. Once a great innovator, Apple has decayed, moving away from its roots as a competitive technology firm, and spending its resources making it harder and harder for consumers and businesses to get out of the Apple ecosystem, and then trying to extend that ecosystem from smartphones into cars, business software, and banks. Apple has become a dangerous corporation, with designs on imposing an authoritarian vision over as much of the economy as it can get away with.
In other words, the broad allegation is about how power corrupts. The complaint may be about technology, but the story here is as old as time. Let’s dive in.
The last reason to care is that, if this monopolization continues, we are handing over the future to Apple, and not just in smartphones. Using its position as the gatekeeper that lives in the pockets of a billion people, that corporation is entering the financial services, fitness, gaming, social media, news media, entertainment, and automotive markets, “often by doing so in exclusionary ways that further reinforce and deepen the competitive moat around the iPhone.”
For instance, the iPhone is now a wallet, with $200 billion of transactions done via ‘tap to pay’ in 2022 alone, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Importantly, the tap-to-pay feature uses a standard near-field communication chip, but Apple Pay is the only app on the iPhone allowed to use tap-to-pay. This exclusionary behavior is intentional, as “Apple envisions that Apple Wallet will ultimately supplant multiple functions of physical wallets to become a single app for shopping, digital keys, transit, identification, travel, entertainment, and more,” and that it will contribute to the stickiness of the Apple ecosystem. (It’s also profitable, Apple already takes a fee of .15% from banks for every transaction that goes over the tap-to-pay on its iPhone.)
