Apple was just hit with an antitrust by the US Justice Department.
As reported by IGN, Apple stands accused of illegally maintaining a monopoly in the smartphone business, which causes harm to both developers and consumers. We won’t go through the finer details here, but to be clear, the lawsuit is not because Apple is so successful at selling iPhones that they are being considered a monopoly.
The lawsuit is the accumulation of five years of investigation in the Justice Department, and points to several different instances of anticompetitive practices. For example, Apple forces all transactions that are processed in iOS apps to go through Apple’s systems, even though there is no legal obligation to do so. This means Apple sees even their user’s bank transactions, which are supposed to be confidential.
Apple, alongside Amazon, Google, and Meta, were part of a 2020 tech antitrust report from the House Antitrust Subcommittee. Apple turned out to be the last of the four to receive a lawsuit from the US government.
We don’t know where the lawsuit goes from here, but there is a clear connection to video game developers and the industry at large. The US government actions comes a week after Epic Games revealed that they would be bringing their Epic Game Store to Apple and iOS, but only in Europe.
Apple has stubbornly disallowed third party stores to set up shop on their platforms, but because of Europe’s Digital Markets Act, Epic gets to launch their store on Apple’s devices, separately from the Apple App Store.
Apple pulled Epic’s Fortnite from the App Store all the way back in August 2020. Epic tried to sue over this, but their suit turned out with a mixed verdict that brought really small wins and losses for both Epic and Apple. Crucially, Epic wasn’t able to get a verdict that allowed them to get Fortnite back into Apple’s platforms. For the past few years, Apple users had to use a browser to get onto Fortnite on Apple devices.
None of this is directly connected to the video game console industry, and yet the ramifications on that industry could be huge. The US government seems to want to do for American consumers what the EU managed to do for their Apple users.
That could mean Fortnite, Microsoft games, and others being playable on Apple’s platforms. That could include cloud streaming games, but even more importantly, it could be a financial windfall for these developers who also happen to make console games.
And such a boon could help reverse the ongoing issues with the video game industry, that has led to a massive wave of layoffs and cancelled projects, and keeps going in its second year now. And so, we all are waiting with bated breath on what happens next on this lawsuit.
