On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice and 16 state attorneys general brought a wide-ranging antitrust lawsuit against Apple for abusing its monopoly in the smartphone market.
The complaint lays out a series of alleged abuses: Apple has unfairly limited access to its popular iOS platform, blocked out certain app developers, and prohibited key functionality that could make its service better for users or give them more choice. It even took aim at the infamous green bubbles that appear when iPhone owners deign to text Android users.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in New Jersey, will likely take years to resolve if it even goes to trial, but it’s far from an isolated assault: Joe Biden’s administration—through two executioners, Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter and Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan—has wielded federal antitrust law as a blunt weapon to whack Big Tech’s most ubiquitous firms. In this way, it’s Biden at his most populist—pushing to bring lower prices and better services to the people.
The internet economy has mandated a rethinking of traditional antitrust enforcement. Long since the storied days of post-industrial trust-busting in the early decades of the 20th century, the cases we see today largely concern free or super-cheap services subsidized by advertising. That’s not exactly the case for the Apple suit, with regulators outlining the ways in which Apple’s decisions and policies directly lead to price increases for consumers. But much of the complaint has to do with the steady worsening of services—either because of Apple’s market power or as a means of maintaining its chokehold on the powerful ecosystem it built. The writer Cory Doctorow calls this phenomenon “enshittification,” though the more-PG term “platform decay” also works.
Indeed, platform decay has been an element of nearly every antitrust suit levied against Big Tech firms in the Biden administration: When the FTC sued Amazon in September 2023, it harped on the degradation of the e-commerce site, which it found littered with Amazon-made products and and sponsored results. The Justice Department made similar arguments at trial against Google this fall, claiming the Mountain View giant was making its search results worse and flooding the system with ads. (The Trump administration originally filed that suit, but it was continued by Biden administration prosecutors.) Surely, the quality of these free-or-cheap-platform companies will be at play when the government faces off with Google in court over its advertising technology in September, and possibly when it goes to court against Meta for anticompetitive mergers with Instagram and WhatsApp.
The era of unbridled and unquestioned growth for Big Tech companies is over. Mergers and acquisitions are as scrutinized as ever, and the U.S. government is dead set on making tech companies pay for the alleged abuses of their station. It’s up to the judges now to decide whether these companies have soiled their platforms enough in the name of maintaining power that something has to change.
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