Back in 2022 on the annual Code Conference, the place tech luminaries undergo on-stage interviews, an viewers member requested Apple CEO Tim Cook for some tech help. “I can’t send my mom certain videos,” he stated, as a result of she used an Android machine incompatible with Apple’s iMessage. Cook’s now-infamous response was, “Buy your mom an iPhone.”

Cook’s comment and Apple’s current choice to block a third-party app from bridging the Android-to-iMessage interoperability chasm are two of the various examples of allegedly monopolistic conduct cited within the US government’s antitrust suit against Apple. Central to the case is Apple’s apply of “locking in” iPhone clients, by undermining competing apps, utilizing its proprietary messaging protocol as glue, and usually making it difficult for individuals to modify to different telephones.

Those accusations are backed up by lawyerly references to the Sherman Act. But the grievance additionally exhibits the Department of Justice crafting a cultural narrative, making an attempt to inform a know-how story with a transparent message—like an episode of crime drama Dragnet, says antitrust professional William Kovacic, who teaches at George Washington University and King’s College, London.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday by the DOJ and greater than a dozen state attorneys basic, claims that along with degrading the standard of third-party apps, Apple “affirmatively undermines the quality of rival smartphones.” Because messages despatched between iPhones by way of Apple’s proprietary community seem in blue bubbles, however these from Android telephones seem in inexperienced and are excluded from many iMessage options, Apple has signaled to customers that rival telephones are of much less high quality, the go well with alleges.

The go well with consists of references to the unfavourable cultural and emotional impression of the restrictiveness of some Apple merchandise. It ranges past the standard antitrust case, through which investigators would possibly deal with supracompetitive pricing or the situations of company offers that limit competitors. The core of US antitrust instances has lengthy been proving customers paid increased costs on account of anticompetitive practices. But a number of key paragraphs inside the 88-page submitting point out the exclusion and social shaming of non-iPhone customers confined inside green chat bubbles, distinguishing this case from among the extra recondite explanations of tech market competitors in recent times.

“Many non-iPhone users also experience social stigma, exclusion, and blame for ‘breaking’ chats where other participants use iPhones,” the go well with reads. It goes on to notice that that is notably highly effective for sure demographics, like youngsters, who the Wall Street Journal reported two years in the past “dread the ostracism” that comes with having an Android cellphone.

The DOJ argues that every one of this reinforces the switching prices that Apple has baked into its telephones. Apple is so dominant within the smartphone market not as a result of its telephones are essentially higher, the go well with alleges, however as a result of it has made speaking on different smartphones worse, thereby making it more durable for customers to surrender their iPhones.

Legal specialists say this social stigma argument will want a lot stronger help to carry up in court docket, as a result of it doesn’t match with conventional definitions of antitrust. “What is Apple actually precluding here? It’s almost like a coolness factor when a company successfully creates a network effect for itself, and I’ve never seen that integrated into an antitrust claim before,” says Paul Swanson, a litigation associate at Holland & Hart LLP in Denver, Colorado, who focuses on know-how and antitrust. “This is going to be an interesting case for antitrust law.”

Regardless, the DOJ’s grievance builds a robust message from the cacophony of shopper voices which have vented frustrations with iMessage’s lack of interoperability in recent times. And it’s a part of a broader, democratizing theme launched by Jonathan Kanter, the Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, says Kovacic, who beforehand served as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. “Kanter basically said, ‘We’re trying to make this body of law accessible to ordinary human beings and take it away from the technicians,” Kovacic says. “Storytelling is overstated in some ways, but my sense is that a lot of work went into this filing.”