The U.S. Justice Department’s landmark antitrust lawsuit Thursday morning against Apple, which accuses the company of illegally maintaining an iPhone smartphone monopoly, reads at times like a technology history lesson.
That’s due in part to repeated references and comparisons in the suit to the DOJ’s prior antitrust case against Microsoft over its Windows monopoly in the late 1990s. But the suit also cites as evidence the inability of many other tech giants, including Microsoft and Amazon, to compete against Apple in smartphones.
Here’s the veritable smartphone graveyard laid out in one portion of the suit:
Many prominent, well-financed companies have tried and failed to successfully enter the relevant markets because of these entry barriers. Past failures include Amazon (which released its Fire mobile phone in 2014 but could not profitably sustain its business and exited the following year); Microsoft (which discontinued its mobile business in 2017); HTC (which exited the market by selling its smartphone business to Google in September 2017); and LG (which exited the smartphone market in 2021). Today, only Samsung and Google remain as meaningful competitors in the U.S. performance smartphone market. Barriers are so high that Google is a distant third to Apple and Samsung despite the fact that Google controls development of the Android operating system.
Of course, Apple will no doubt argue that those were failures by those companies, not the result of illegal behavior on its part.
We’re still reading and digesting the complaint. You can read the full text here.
