The Department of Justice announced a groundbreaking antitrust lawsuit against Apple that accuses the tech giant of illegally monopolizing the smartphone market.
The context surrounding this lawsuit is that for years, the Justice Department has pressured Apple to give them backdoor access to snoop on its users. To Apple’s credit, it refused and paid a fortune in legal fees to fight them off. Now, ironically the Justice Department is suing Apple for not giving its private sector competitors a back door into Apple’s devices. You and I both know the Department of Justice itself wants that backdoor for its own its.
One of the key legs of the DOJ’s lawsuit is the emotional damage caused by green chat bubbles. When an Apple device messages another Apple device, the chat bubble containing the message is blue. Because of this, Android-using Gen-Zers on TikTok have claimed to be socially ostracized by their iPhone-using friends for creating green chat bubbles while messaging. While the White House’s Justice Department would have you believe the green bubble is in place only to make people feel poor, it actually serves a valuable purpose. Apple spends an immense amount of money every year ensuring the end-to-end encryption of messaging between Apple devices. When you send a message to another Apple device and it turns blue, you know the message was delivered securely. This cannot be said for SMS text messaging which is notoriously prone to being hacked. This is one of the many reasons why two-factor authentication used via SMS text message is not nearly as secure as using an authentication app.
One of the other conscious decisions that Apple made was to leave everything on the phone. The best example of this is Siri. Compared to Alexa, Siri sucks because Siri is phone-based, not cloud-based, and therefore does not have the vast data available in the cloud. While changes are coming to Siri in the future, Apple chose to prioritize security and the result has been a closed system whose products integrate seamlessly with one another but awkwardly with the outside world.
The lawsuit brings to mind the recent Spirit/Jet Blue merger that was shuttered by the Justice Department for allegedly giving consumers few choices. The reality was that after the merger was called off, each airline reduced routes and cut staff because it didn’t have the economies of scale it needed to continue operations at its current rate. The only thing that Biden’s Justice Department achieved was terminated employees and fewer flight options for the American consumer. The same law of unintended consequences would impact Americans if the Department of Justice is successful in breaking up Apple.
This is the product of a weaponized Justice Department with an axe to grind parlayed with a President desperate to shore up support from those with hurt feelings. If we’re being honest, the only people who think this is a good idea are the academics and nonprofit heads of the bureaucratic state who fundamentally don’t understand capitalism.
My fear is what happens if all of this legal lawfare succeeds in preventing Trump from winning. What that means for any future republican or opposition candidate.
How many of you have actually read the story and read the previous suits between Apple and Samsung? Guessing very few. Erick gives half the story in his discussion on the issue and the green bubble is simply an example of their restrictions. His bias took over 100% on this one. But hey… however we can bash Biden is a good reason, accurate or not, right?