Elizabeth Warren: DoJ ‘Exactly Right’ to Sue Apple and Break Their Monopoly

EXCERPT:

WARREN: "But what Apple did over time is they built what’s called walled garden. This is how we refer to it. That is, all the products and services all tie together, in effect, behind the wall. So if you’re a developer and you’ve got some really super-duper cool app that you want to be able to sell, sorry, you are outside the wall, and Apple says, 'Not going to compete with you,' and the people within the walled garden all have to stay inside it. It’s not about out-competing all of those competitors. It’s about building walls that are high enough that all of your users never get to try anyone else. I’ll give you an example of that. So it turns out that about 98% of people who replace their iPhones replace them with another iPhone. You know why? Because it’s really easy to do that. But when you go to countries that have actually pushed on Apple’s monopoly and said you’ve got to permit what they call super apps, which means other apps that make it easy to migrate all of your data and connections to another phone, only about half of the people, when they replaced their iPhone, go with another iPhone. They want to try something else. That means lower prices, more competition, more things that they can see in the marketplace. Apple here in the United States has blocked all that off. So what the FTC is saying, and Department of Justice, is not that you are big because you created this one product everyone wants. It’s because you’re created these anti-competitive practices that mean nobody gets to look at any of the alternative options, apps and so on. And they want to break that up. I think they’re exactly right."