Why does Apple treat its iPhone ecosystem as a walled garden?

If you read the papers in the Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit against the

Cooperino Tech giant, you'll get very different stories.

The DOJ says that Apple is a monopolist and that it blocks cross-platform products to make

competing smartphones less appealing. Apple, for its part, doesn't deny that it imposes restrictions,

but it explains they're in place to make Apple's smartphones better, safer, more trustworthy, more seamless, and so on.

In any event, Apple goes on, if the restrictions are so bad, people can just leave the garden by switching to Android.

Not so, the DOJ replies, Many of the restrictions are useless nuisances

meant to keep users locked in. Apple executives admit as much in emails. Many of the measures

would be irrational unless Apple knew it was a monopolist. Round and round, the two sides go.

The lawsuit was filed in March in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.

The DOJ is joined by a bunch of states.

Apple has moved to dismiss the complaint, and a hearing on that motion is scheduled to occur

November 20th, which, if we are running on

schedule, is today.

This is the Tech Policy Podcast.

I'm Corbyn Barthold.

Here to discuss the ins and outs of the DOJ's Apple Antitrust case with me is once again the great Jeff Manning, president and founder

of the International Center for Law and Economics. With this episode, Jeff and I have now,

over the course of a little over three years, covered on this show every single major big tech antitrust lawsuit. Apple, Google,

Amazon, Facebook, Apple again. Okay, fine. We haven't done Google ads, but that one's just so

confusing. Other than that one, we've collected the whole set.

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