The New York Times (that should be a gift link)

The Justice Department is in the late stages of an investigation into Apple and could file a sweeping antitrust case taking aim at the company’s strategies to protect the dominance of the iPhone as soon as the first half of this year, said three people with knowledge of the matter.

OK, so I wrote a random one off line on BlueSky/Mastodon about this, but I think there’s more to get into.

Let’s start: “The dominance of the iPhone”. Per random data that I could quickly look up online — Apple has roughly 17 percent of the market. That’s behind Samsung.

We clearly have a different understanding of the word “dominant”.

Edit: My pal Jemal pointed out that in the United States, Apple has 53% of the market. So, yeah, technically dominant.

The agency is focused on how Apple has used its control over its hardware and software to make it more difficult for consumers to ditch the company’s devices, as well as for rivals to compete, said the people, who spoke anonymously because the investigation was active.

OK, what do they mean here? Let’s continue on.

Specifically, investigators have examined how the Apple Watch works better with the iPhone than with other brands, as well as how Apple locks competitors out of its iMessage service. They have also scrutinized Apple’s payments system for the iPhone, which blocks other financial firms from offering similar services, these people said.

OK, cool. So let’s next go after Nintendo for not making games for the Xbox and PlayStation. Or Sony for not allowing third party controllers to work better than the first party DualSense. Or McDonald’s, not letting other places sell the Big Mac or the McNugget.

The Apple suit would likely be even more expansive than previous challenges to the company, attacking its powerful business model that draws together the iPhone with devices like the Apple Watch and services like Apple Pay to attract and keep consumers loyal to its products. Rivals have said that they have been denied access to key Apple features, like the Siri virtual assistant, prompting them to argue the practices are anticompetitive.

Just because someone develops something a certain way, and your stuff doesn’t work with it, isn’t anticompetitive. It’s an ecosystem. Google has it. Samsung has it. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have it in gaming.

They have also looked at how the Apple Watch works better alongside the iPhone than other competing smartwatches. Users of Garmin devices have complained in Apple’s support forums about being unable to use their watches to reply to certain text messages from their iPhones or tweak the notifications they receive from the iPhone that they have connected to their watch.

This maybe has a point. But, god, what a fraction of a fraction of an argument.

Apple’s new privacy tool, App Tracking Transparency, which allows iPhone users to explicitly choose whether an app can track them, drew scrutiny because of its curtailing of user data collection by advertisers. Advertising companies have said that the tool is anticompetitive.

Changing how a piece of technology works is not anticompetitive. Especially when Apple does not compete in advertising. If they start running their own ad networks against Google and Meta, and those get around ATT, sure. Anticompetitive. But you can’t be anticompetitive if you aren’t competing. It’s in the goddamned word.

Apple isn’t totally innocent here. I think their stance towards third party applications or app stores on the iPhone and iPad is silly, especially given that you can do the same thing on a Mac right now today. But this is inane.

John Gruber did a much more eloquent version of this post strictly on the whole Beeper thing last month, and I’m sure he’ll have something on Daring Fireball about this soon, but my thoughts can be summed up pretty easily…

We really fucking need younger people who understand technology in key positions of government.

I can’t wait for another big public hearing where Senator Oldasfuck starts asking Tim Cook why it’s so goddamned hard for him to print his photos from his phone, why is everything he writes in all caps, and what the HELL is a PDF anyway?