“Apple Inc. urged a federal judge to dismiss a consumer lawsuit alleging the company maintains a monopoly over iPhone applications,” Karen Gullo reports for Bloomberg.
“Attorneys who filed the suit in 2011 claim that a monopoly exists because an iPhone user who doesn’t want to pay what developers charge for applications available through Apple’s App Store can’t go anywhere else to buy them,” Gullo reports. “Apple requires iPhone software developers to turn over 30 percent of what they charge for an application, increasing prices and excluding competitors from the iPhone ‘aftermarket’ of applications, they claim.”
Gullo reports, “Apple doesn’t set the price for paid applications, and charging a price for distribution of a product on a new and unique platform doesn’t violate any antitrust laws, said Dan Wall, Apple’s attorney, at yesterday’s court hearing in Oakland, California. ‘There’s nothing illegal about creating a system that is closed in a sense,’ Wall told U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.”
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