United States v. Apple<\/em> is a lawsuit written for the general public, an 88-page<\/a> press release designed to be read aloud on cable news shows.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A lawsuit is, functionally speaking, a communication between lawyers and a judge. Because it is a specialized missive to a specialized audience, it can become highly technical and jargonistic \u2014 this is especially so when it comes to niche areas of law like antitrust or complex sectors of litigation like technology. Tech lawsuits are often obscure even to techies, interspersed with bizarre software terminology that is pretty much meaningless outside of a court of law. (For example, antitrust law loves \u201cmiddleware,\u201d and copyright law loves \u201ctechnological protection measure.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Although the dreaded \u201cmiddleware\u201d does appear in United States v. Apple<\/em>, you can barely tell it was written by lawyers. You only have to compare it to the 1998 complaint in United States v. Microsoft<\/em><\/a> to see what I mean. The Apple lawsuit even opens like it\u2019s trying to be a magazine feature:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In 2010, a top Apple executive emailed Apple\u2019s then-CEO about an ad for the new Kindle e-reader. The ad began with a woman who was using her iPhone to buy and read books on the Kindle app. She then switches to an Android smartphone and continues to read her books using the same Kindle app. The executive wrote to Jobs: one \u201cmessage that can\u2019t be missed is that it is easy to switch from iPhone to Android. Not fun to watch.\u201d<\/strong><\/em> Jobs was clear in his response: Apple would \u201cforce\u201d developers to use its payment system to lock in both developers and users on its platform. Over many years, Apple has repeatedly responded to competitive threats like this one by making it harder or more expensive for its users and developers to leave than by making it more attractive for them to stay.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n A scene! Characters! The invocation of Steve Jobs himself! Personally, I think this paragraph could use a hard edit prior to publication, but then again, it\u2019s supposed to be a lawsuit, not a work of narrative nonfiction<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In fact, this opening paragraph isn\u2019t even numbered: legal filings like this generally have every paragraph numbered.\u00a0It\u2019s instead part of a weird little literary curtain-raiser that\u2019s been stuck right before the table of contents. That\u2019s not against the rules \u2014 note that United States v. Google <\/em>(filed 2023<\/a>) has a single, terse intro paragraph outside the numbered section \u2014 but US v. Apple<\/em> powers up for two whole pages before getting into allegations.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Compare that to the opening paragraph of the complaint<\/a> in the DOJ\u2019s 1998 blockbuster antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft (which is, of course, properly labeled as paragraph 1):<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 1.\tThis is an action under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act to restrain anticompetitive conduct by defendant Microsoft Corporation (\u201cMicrosoft\u201d), the world\u2019s largest supplier of computer software for personal computers (\u201cPCs\u201d), and to remedy the effects of its past unlawful conduct.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s almost like the lawyers in US v. Microsoft <\/em>wrote a document asking a judge to apply the Sherman Antitrust Act to the market for personal computers! What a snooze!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Meanwhile, although US v. Apple<\/em> does have a lawsuit swimming somewhere inside its massive bulk, it is, for the most part, a fairly readable litany of all the annoying things Apple has done to me, personally, over the years. Green bubbling my friends and loved ones? Not being able to buy Kindle books in the Amazon app? The way I can\u2019t change NFC tap to do anything but open Apple Wallet? The laggy badness of every non-Apple smartwatch<\/a> when paired with the iPhone? The DOJ knows. The DOJ cares. I feel seen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are even a beguiling few paragraphs in which the DOJ compares the need to regularly update AAA video game titles to the onerous process of App Store review and then concludes that \u201cApple\u2019s conduct made cloud streaming apps so unattractive to users that no developer designed one for the iPhone.\u201d At no point does the DOJ allege that Apple is why I can\u2019t play AAA games on my iPhone\u2026. but it\u2019s also not not<\/em> saying that. Is Apple standing between me and my video games???<\/em> I wonder, as I unconsciously rummage around for my pitchfork.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n From cloud streaming games to CarPlay<\/a>, the DOJ complaint tries to rope in the burning grievances of every kind of nerd and then some. The only thing that\u2019s missing is a tirade on how ever-increasing screen sizes<\/a> are victimizing me, a person with small hands. (At the Thursday press conference<\/a>, Attorney General Merrick Garland made no mention of how Sarah Jeong would like to see the SE return to its 2016 size.)\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You can almost forget this is a lawsuit and not just the compiled observations of a single very motivated poster in The Verge<\/em> comments section \u2014 until you get to page 57. There, the document suddenly changes voice, finally pivoting into a formal communication to a judge. \u201cMobile phones,\u201d the complaint reads primly, \u201care portable devices that enable communications over radio frequencies instead of telephone landlines.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s fun to engage with the legal distillation of nerd rage at the line level, but there\u2019s also an overarching narrative here that the DOJ is trying to push, one with potentially enormous ramifications. At Thursday\u2019s press conference, as well as in the complaint, the Justice Department took great pains to call back<\/a> to United States v. Microsoft<\/em>. It\u2019s obvious why, of course. It\u2019s not just that it was the last really big W<\/a> the feds took home in the world of tech antitrust \u2014 the present-day battle over iOS\u2019s closed garden does, in fact, look a lot like the browser wars of yesteryear that sparked the Microsoft antitrust case!\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But while those specific similarities are relevant to a judge, they aren\u2019t as much to the general public. What the DOJ wants out of this callback is bigger and more important. It wants to tie these two cases together in the popular consciousness and, in doing so, define itself and its role in history. \u201cWhen Apple began developing mobile consumer devices, it did so against the backdrop of United States v. Microsoft<\/em>, which created new opportunities for innovation in areas that would become critical to the success of Apple\u2019s consumer devices and the company itself,\u201d the complaint reads.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Justice Department wants the public to think of Apple\u2019s success as something that was, in part, handed to them by an antitrust division that acts like a recurring banhammer on a 20-year timer. DOJ is a benevolent forest ranger, tending to the United States economy with controlled burns. Microsoft had to be crushed in the early aughts in order for Apple to thrive; now Apple must be crushed in order to bring forth the next era of tech. (The incessant harping on \u201csuper apps<\/a>\u201d in the complaint may be someone at DOJ trying desperately to get Elon Musk\u2019s extremely fickle attention.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Let\u2019s just say we\u2019re not exactly in a place where we can A\/B test antitrust<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Of course, the long saga of the Microsoft<\/em> antitrust action (especially if you count the lingering tail of the appellate case) coincided with a lot of things: the founding of Google, the dot com crash, the foundings of both Tencent and Baidu, the \u201celection\u201d of George W. Bush, September 11th, the Iraq War. The United States is no longer in the same position it once was \u2014 in diplomacy, in war, or in technology. And the essential dynamics of the American tech sector, not just the names of the major players involved, look very different from how they did just 10 years ago \u2014 let alone 20. While United States v. Microsoft<\/em> almost certainly had a substantial effect on the technology industry and society at large, let\u2019s just say we\u2019re not exactly in a place where we can A\/B test antitrust. DOJ wants to write a narrative about its role in the technological ecosystem and the American economy, but whether that narrative actually rings true remains to be seen.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Meanwhile, the opening volley in its battle against one of America\u2019s favorite companies<\/a> is a killer start, not least in part because of an unusual degree of lawyerly insight into the human psyche. The complaint speaks directly to the tech aficionados rather than speaking over them and to a federal judge. After all, the more bought into the Apple ecosystem you are, the more opportunities you have to be annoyed by Apple. And those hundreds of little annoyances, says the DOJ, are Apple\u2019s fault<\/em>, not yours. It\u2019s an extremely tempting invitation to come rage with them. And nobody can bring the hate quite as hard as the nerds do \u2014\u00a0and sometimes, it\u2019s because the nerds kind of have a point<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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