The Justice Department sued tech giant Apple on Thursday, kicking off a potentially historic antitrust battle. The lawsuit alleges that Apple's ecosystem of products are designed to limit competition and put consumers at a disadvantage. “Each step in Apple’s course of conduct built and reinforced the moat around its smartphone monopoly,” the authors write. Later in the filing they add that "this case is about freeing smartphone markets from Apple’s anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct and restoring competition to lower smartphone prices for consumers, reducing fees for developers, and preserving innovation for the future."
If the Justice Department decides to break up Apple, it will be the first time they have done this to a large company since they broke up the Bell System in 1982. Yet this is also the third antitrust lawsuit that the Justice Department has filed against Apple since 2010. Apple settled a lawsuit that alleged they had colluded to suppress workers' salaries, and they won a trial in which they were accused of conspiracy to fix the prices of e-books. This new lawsuit, however, is much wider in scope, with prosecutors claiming the company's "astronomical valuation" is due to anticompetitive practices in its iPhone, Apple Watch advertising, browser, FaceTime and news businesses.
