A U.S. federal judge in Seattle ruled on Thursday that Apple and Amazon must face a consumer antitrust lawsuit in U.S. court accusing them of conspiring to artificially inflate the price of iPhones and iPads sold on Amazon.com.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge John Coughenour rejected bids from Apple and Amazon to dismiss the prospective class action on various legal grounds.
Coughenour said the “validity” of the relevant market, a central issue in antitrust litigation, was a question for a jury.
The plaintiffs are U.S. residents who bought new iPhones and iPads on Amazon beginning in January 2019. They contend an agreement between Apple and Amazon that went into effect that year restricted the number of competitive resellers in violation of antitrust provisions.
In 2018, according to the lawsuit, there were some 600 third-party Apple resellers on Amazon. Apple agreed to give Amazon a discount on its products if Amazon reduced the number of Apple resellers from its marketplace, the lawsuit alleged.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote in 2019, “Eliminating counterfeit Apple products on Amazon isn’t illegal.”
Apple has the right to vet Authorized Apple Resellers in order to maintain high levels of service.
Apple obviously wants as much uniformity in, and control of, the sales experience of their products as possible. — MacDailyNews, May 21, 2019
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I lived in Washington and I can tell you they have the most whacked out liberal judges you can find. Between Seattle, Portland and San Francisco, I think they are having a contest for who can be the dummest. I guess since drugs are not illegal in any of those places, the judges are just sitting back, enjoying paychecks and kicking the can down the road so some other court can overrule their crack pipe rulings in the future.
Where is the anti trust suit over main stream media companies?