April wasn’t a great month for Apple. The tech giant endured the lost iPhone 4G debacle, and CEO Steve Jobs’ strongly worded post against Adobe on Apple’s official blog has now caught the attention of the federal government. The New York Post reports that the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are negotiating over which agency will begin an antitrust inquiry into Apple. Apple is accused of hindering competition by excluding Flash support, limiting app development to Apple-only gadgets. Though an investigation is unlikely, a change in Apple’s stance on Flash could encourage positive changes in the future.

The antitrust inquiry would focus on one key part of Apple’s developer agreement which restricts iPhone and iPad app development in third-party technologies such as Flash. Without the option for Flash, developers are required to use Apple’s approved programming tools. The Post reports that by limiting development options, Apple is essentially blocking its competition. Antitrust suits are notoriously difficult to prove, as it must be found that the company in question is not only a monopoly, but that it also abused its power as a monopoly. Apple is clearly not a monopoly – its market share in the U.S. smartphone market was only 25 percent at the end of the last quarter. Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt commented on this fact, writing:

“Apple’s doesn’t enjoy that kind of market share. Its slice of the U.S. smartphone market is smaller than Research in Motion’s, and Google’s Android share is rapidly catching up. And while there are companies that can legitimately claim they have been harmed by the success of the iPhone — Palm comes first to mind — Palm can hardly blame Section 3.3.1 of the SDK for its troubles.”

In Steve Jobs’ blog on the subject, he points out that Apple chooses not to include Flash support on its products because it makes the products weaker, not stronger. Though the post is full of technical details, it’s clear Apple’s decisions are made with customers and developers in mind – not for the purpose of killing competition, as the Post reports. If anything, Apple encourages healthy competition and creativity by requiring development outside of the Flash environment. Apple may exclude Flash, but it supports many other popular programming formats such as HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. An excerpt from Jobs’ post says, “Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen.”

To read more about Apple’s case, visit Sparxoo.com

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