The US Division of Justice has obtained mail: A coalition of greater than a dozen tech advocacy teams wrote to the company right this moment calling on it to launch an investigation into allegedly anticompetitive habits by Apple.
The letter says that Apple’s current blocking of Beeper, which reverse engineered iMessage to permit compatibility with Android telephones, is one other instance of Apple “abusing its energy to stifle competitors and defend its famed ‘walled backyard.’” It was despatched by the Tech Oversight Venture, which campaigns for harder tech regulation.
A second letter was despatched to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday by Demand Progress, which works on internet-related civil liberties, asking it to launch its personal Apple probe. Greater than a dozen different progressive advocacy teams cosigned the 2 letters, together with the Digital Frontier Basis, the American Financial Liberties Venture, and Struggle for the Future.
The Division of Justice has been reported to be investigating Apple over antitrust issues since at the least 2020. Tech Oversight Venture’s letter to the DOJ urged it to speed up that work and file an antitrust swimsuit towards Apple, pointing to what it referred to as a “lengthy, ongoing historical past of anticompetitive habits, together with favoring its personal merchandise on its gadgets, unfair insurance policies for third-party apps and management of the App Retailer market, and utilizing its dominance to crush smaller rivals.” Bloomberg reported earlier in December that an EU antitrust investigation may make an enforcement resolution towards Apple over its management of the app retailer in early 2024.
The letter to the DOJ additionally cited the current shutdown of Beeper Mini and prior complaints by Tile, maker of a monitoring system, that its product’s performance was affected by Apple when the iPhone maker launched its personal AirTag trackers.
In its personal letter, Demand Progress, which claims greater than 1,000,000 members, appealed to Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Amy Klobuchar, chair of that group’s subcommittee on antitrust, to name for a public listening to and investigation into Apple’s practices, together with its technique of preserving iMessage unique to its personal gadgets.
“Apple is trying to squash efforts to streamline messaging between Apple and Android gadgets,” the letter reads. It cites accusations that by making messages from individuals with out iPhones seem in inexperienced bubbles, Apple exploits peer stress, particularly on youngsters, to advance its personal pursuits. The corporate didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Pile On
The Apple-Beeper episode has triggered new stress on Apple to loosen its tight management of its providers. On December 17, 4 US senators wrote to the assistant lawyer basic of the DOJ’s antitrust division, Jonathan Kanter, calling for the division to analyze whether or not Apple probably violated antitrust legal guidelines when it reduce off a few of Beeper’s performance between Android messages and iMessage.
Beeper, a three-year-old Silicon Valley startup, launched its Beeper Mini app on December 5 to bridge the hole between SMS messaging on Android telephones and Apple’s iMessage protocol on iPhones. The app runs on Android telephones and initially price $2 monthly however is now supplied totally free.
