Former Judge Andrew Napolitano told Newsmax on Friday that the Justice Department and Apple will likely reach an agreement to dismiss the antitrust lawsuit that the DOJ filed against the company this week, but only after both sides spend “millions in legal fees.”
The Justice Department on Thursday filed a civil lawsuit against Apple accusing it of having an illegal monopoly over the smartphone market.
The suit, which was joined by more than a dozen state attorneys general, claims that Apple restricts development on its operating system in a way that causes consumers to pay higher prices and blocks developers from creating products on other smartphone platforms.
Napolitano said on “National Report” that once “the DOJ has a case you start negotiating with Apple’s lawyers, that negotiation has been going on for a couple of years and it finally collapsed, and they wrote the complaint, and they filed it.”
He noted that “Apple has made it difficult to integrate its products with others. So take an example: You buy a Ford automobile. You want to be able to put a GM tire on the Ford automobile. That Ford automobile has to accept the GM tire. If it doesn’t, then Ford is accused of predatory tactics.”
The former judge continued: “So the federal government wants Apple to accept apps and communications and operating systems from competitors. And Apple says, ‘No. We have our own. We’re going to sell our product, and we don’t want others to know what’s inside our product. We spent billions, even trillions to develop this product, and you want us to share it with our competitors?’”
He went on to predict that it could take “years,” possibly a decade, for this case to go to trial, “that’s how long these cases take. That’s how much pretrial litigation there is, that’s how many documents there are to review.”
Napolitano also noted that “If it ever does” go to trial, the case would likely be decided by a judge, and not a jury, but he predicted that “at some point, both sides will say, OK, enough is enough. Let’s figure out how to resolve this, after millions in legal fees.”
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