Apple Accused of Sherman Act Violations for Disallowing COVID-19 App

Apple committed “arbitrary and capricious restraint of trade,” in violation of the Sherman Act, when it disallowed a COVID-19 geolocation-based symptom-tracking app from being posted for sale in the App Store in the early days of the pandemic, alleged a Tuesday complaint (in Pacer) in U.S. District Court in Concord, New Hampshire. An “ad hoc group” of developers, including a Dartmouth University computer scientist and a former NASA chief medical officer, submitted the app, called Coronavirus Reporter, for approval, but Apple rejected it on grounds that the submitters were not a “recognized healthcare company,” said the complaint. “Plaintiff is and was a bioinformatics development company” that developed “other large scale data and bioinformatics applications since 2014 that had served hundreds of millions of individuals,” it said. For “many millions” of consumers, “their de facto access to the internet relies upon using an iOS device,” it said. “As such, Apple operates a de facto monopoly for access to the national internet communication backbone.” The Coronavirus Reporter app, “had it been allowed, would likely have provided useful bioinformatics data, and provided a medium for free information exchange among United States citizens and COVID patients,” it said. Apple didn’t comment Wednesday.