Comment by zie
2 years ago
For a second, let's just assume that Apple is 100% guilty. What will the fine be? If it's anything less than many billions of dollars, there is zero incentive for Apple to do anything at all different in the future.
Suing Apple(or any other company over stuff like this) when the fines will be a tiny slap on the wrist at worst will not incentivize proper behaviour, so there is literally zero reason for doing this except for the govt to feel good about itself, see!! we got a few hundred million from that evil corp for doing bad things. LOL. Apple could plead guilty tomorrow, pay the fine and continue doing business and not even notice.
Ongoing fines until they achieve compliance, or legally barring them from operating in the US. I think that's usually how rulings go in these kinds of cases.
Page 76 of the lawsuit PDF goes into some specifics under the section "Request for relief".
The US govt would never ever bar the worlds largest, most profitable public company from operating in the US. That's ridiculous and nowhere in the Request For Relief that I just read: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24492020/doj-apple-an...
It basically boils down to: stop doing the bad things and pay a fine. The fine being an amount equal to it's costs for bringing the suit, pennies on the dollar next to the dollars Apple made.
There is no incentive to change future behavior here. When the govt broke up AT&T's monopoly, there was an incentive to change behavior. Since then it's weakly enforced "fines" that do nothing to curtail future monopolistic behavior.
I imagine this will happen: Some of this will stick, but it will be stuff Apple has already promised (like adopting RCS) and they will pay a small(to them) fine and will continue on business as usual with no actual changes being made, just like all the other lawsuits of this type the US govt has done in the last few decades. Some people will feel better I suppose, even though absolutely nothing of substance will have changed.