Ant-iTrust?

Apple – or, more specifically, Apple CEO Steve Jobs – flexed some muscles in the last week by proclaiming that Adobe Flash has no place on the iPhone, the iPad, or whatever’s iNext.  As previously discussed (here and there, as well), the walled garden that is the App Store positions Apple not only as the gatekeeper of “tech cool,” but also as the potential object of an antitrust investigation.

Today, two Washington agencies are reportedly deciding who gets to launch an Apple antitrust investigation.

As easy as it would be to point to Jobs’s chest-beating, this is the second time in two weeks where a company is drawing ire from inside the beltway.  And in both cases, the companies in the crosshairs are direct competitors to Google.  That doesn’t make Google the Michael Corleone of federal tech policy, taking out enemies silently and sequentially (though it would be kind of cool if it were).  It does mean that technology policymakers seem to be on the same page as Google as far as what access to the internet or the mobile web should look like.

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