Monopolizing e-books, manipulating pricing, and apple paying for its bully

Release date：2016-07-27   Views：2034

Monopolizing e-books, manipulating pricing, and apple paying for its bully

Apple's last attempt to overturn a ruling that it had conspired to raise the price of e-books in violation of competition laws ended in failure. This is the company's latest fierce confrontation with US judicial authorities.

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected Apple's appeal against a lower court ruling. The lower court found that Apple had been involved in "market self policing" against its rival Amazon, and "unreasonably restricted trading" by creating "cartels" with publishers to manipulate e-book prices.

The Supreme Court's rejection comes as apple has just begun a long battle with the Department of justice over whether it can be forced to help investigators unlock the iPhone used by a murderer in the San Bernardino terrorist q-attack in December.

The ruling is also a blow to Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, who has described the case as "bizarre" and defended an agreement reached between his predecessor, Steve Jobs, and eddy cue, Apple's head of Internet services.

"We have no fault in this, so we are very principled in this case," Cook said in an interview in 2013. "We will not sign documents that say we did something we didn't do at all. So we will fight. "

Under a conditional settlement reached in July 2014, apple must pay $400 million in compensation to consumers who buy e-books through iBooks stores. Five publishers have paid $166 million as part of the 2013 settlement.

But the Justice Department said Apple and book publishers had launched "reckless misconduct" at the lower prices imposed by Amazon's Kindle Store. Bill Baer, Assistant Attorney General of the Department of justice's antitrust division, said: "Apple's responsibility for deliberately colluding with book publishers to raise the price of E-books has been fully established. Consumers will be compensated. "

Users who have bought books at a higher price will receive store points as compensation.

The U.S. government accused apple of playing a "leader" role while Amazon's Kindle dominated the market, colluding with major book publishers around the world to use the iPad to raise the price of e-books. Amazon sets the price of e-books in its Kindle Store, while Apple uses iBooks to launch a "proxy pricing" model, which allows publishers to determine the price.

The 2013 trial revealed that Mr. jobs and Mr. Kui had sent a series of emails to publishing executives during which they were negotiating with each other over iBooks.

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