Apple Antitrust

Apple's App Store fees are akin to "highway robbery," Representative David Cicilline told The Verge in the latest Vergecast episode. Cicilline, who is the Chairman of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Antitrust looking into the App Store agreements that Apple has with developers, spoke to The Verge alongside Basecamp CTO David Heinemeier Hansson, developer of the "Hey" app that Apple rejected...

As part of an ongoing probe of competition in digital markets that involves Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee this week sent a letter to each company demanding to know whether their CEOs will testify in hearings set to take place in July, reports Axios. The antitrust investigators want to know by Sunday whether Apple, Google parent company Alphabet,...

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek today told Bloomberg that he expects Apple to further "open up" in long term following the antitrust complaint Spotify filed with the European Union last year. In the complaint, Spotify said that Apple enforces App Store rules that "purposely limit choice and stifle innovation at the expense of the user experience," and that Apple acts as "both a player and referee to...

France's competition watchdog on Monday fined Apple 1.1 billion euros ($1.23 billion) for anti-competitive behavior in its distribution network and an abuse of economic dependence on its resellers, reports Reuters. At the same time, France's Competition Authority also levied fines of $84.7 million and $69 million against Apple wholesalers Tech Data and Ingram Micro for their roles in the...

The Federal Trade Commission today announced that it has issued Special Orders to Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Google parent company Alphabet requiring them to report all prior acquisitions not previously reported. In the United States, companies are required to report acquisitions over a certain value to the FTC under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act, while acquisitions under ...

The United States Department of Justice is continuing with its antitrust investigation into Apple and has recently reached out to developers who create apps for Apple's iOS devices, reports Reuters. Suren Ramasubbu, CEO of app development company Mobicip, was interviewed by a U.S. investigator in November and questioned about Mobicip's interactions with Apple. Mobicip makes parental control...

As part of a bipartisan investigation of competition in digital markets, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee today sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook requesting that the company provide any documents and executive communications related to its various policies for the App Store, product repairs, and more. The investigation seeks any internal documents or communication involving Apple...

The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets, or ACM for short, today announced that it will investigate whether Apple abuses its position in the App Store by, for example, giving preferential treatment to its own apps. ACM says the investigation will initially focus on Apple because the majority of anticompetitive allegations it has received from other companies and developers have...

Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab has filed an antitrust complaint against Apple with the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service relating to the company's App Store distribution policy. The action comes less than a week after Spotify filed its own complaint against Apple with EU antitrust regulators over the tech giant's "unfair" ‌App Store‌ practices. Kaspersky's complaint is specifically to...

With the intense ongoing legal battle between Qualcomm and Apple, it's easy to forget that Qualcomm is also facing an FTC antitrust lawsuit for using anticompetitive tactics to remain the main supplier for baseband processors for smartphones. The FTC hasn't forgotten, though, and FTC lawyers are in a Northern California courtroom before well-known judge Lucy Koh, who also presided over the...

Customers who purchased a Kindle e-book between April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012 may be receiving a credit from Amazon this morning as the retailer continues distributing funds from an antitrust lawsuit levied against Apple back in 2013 by the United States Justice Department. Emails were sent out to eligible customers in the United States this morning, and Amazon has also set up a website that...

Apple and Amazon have agreed to cease all exclusivity obligations previously put in place between the two companies regarding the supply and distribution of audiobooks through iTunes and Audible (via Reuters). The partnership between the two companies previously incited a complaint from the German Publishers and Booksellers Association in 2015 centering around the potential for a monopoly in the...

Apple will have to pay a $450 million settlement in the protracted e-books antitrust case, which saw the company found guilty of conspiring with publishers to inflate the prices of e-books back in 2014 (via Bloomberg). In October, Apple submitted an appeal to overturn the guilty ruling, but today the United States Supreme Court declined to question the verdict, meaning Apple must now comply...

A coalition of authors and well-known booksellers have come forth to back Apple in a petition to overturn a recent ruling that stated the company was liable in conspiring to fix the prices of electronic books when its iBooks store launched on the iPad in 2010 (via Cult of Mac). Together, the Authors Guild, Authors United, the American Booksellers Association, and Barnes & Noble have filed a...

Apple is asking the United States Supreme Court to overturn the 2013 U.S. Appellate Court ruling that found the company guilty of conspiring with publishers to inflate the prices of e-books, reports Reuters. Apple's petition comes following the loss of a June appeal where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the guilty verdict and maintained Apple violated antitrust laws and ...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York today rejected Apple's bid to disqualify antitrust compliance monitor Michael Bromwich, who was appointed to watch the company since it was found liable of conspiring with publishers to fix e-book prices a few years ago, reports Reuters."The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said a lower court judge did not abuse her...