 U.S. Supreme Court justices on Monday will take up Apple Inc's effort to bury a lawsuit seeking damages from the company for allegedly monopolizing the market for iPhone software applications and forcing consumers to overpay. The justices will hear arguments in Apple's appeal of a lower court's decision to revive the proposed class-action lawsuit by a group of iPhone users. The lawsuit accused the Cupertino, California-based technology company of violating federal antitrust laws by requiring apps to be sold through the company's App Store and then taking a 30 percent commission from the purchases. The iPhone users, including lead plaintiff Robert Pepper of Chicago, filed the suit in a California federal court in 2011, claiming Apple's monopoly leads to inflated prices compared to if apps were available from other sources. Though developers set the prices of their apps, Apple collects the payments from iPhone users, keeping a 30 percent commission on each purchase. One area of dispute in the case is whether app developers recoup the cost of that commission by passing it on to consumers. Developers earned more than $26 billion in 2017, a 30 percent increase over 2016, according to Apple. The company, backed by Republican President Donald Trump's administration as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the justices in legal papers that siding with the iPhone users who filed the lawsuit would threaten the burgeoning field of e-commerce, which generates hundreds of billions of dollars annually in U.S. retail sales. The plaintiffs, as well as antitrust watchdog groups, said closing courthouse doors to those who buy end products would undermine antitrust enforcement and allow monopolistic behavior to expand unchecked. The plaintiffs were backed by 30 state attorneys general, including from Texas, California and New York. Full details can be found on OUR FORUM.  The UK Parliament is determined to get to the bottom of Facebook's data privacy practices, whether or not Mark Zuckerberg is willing to testify. Digital Culture, Media and Sports committee (DCMS) chairman Damian Collins used an uncommon process to force the founder of software developer Six4Three to hand over internal Facebook documents while he was on a business trip to London. The files reportedly include details of Facebook data decisions that enabled the Cambridge Analytica scandal, including emails between executives and conversations with Zuckerberg. Six4Three had taken action against Facebook after claiming the site was aware of the potential consequences of its privacy policies and intentionally drawing attention to the loophole that Cambridge Analytica used to gather information. Facebook has maintained that the assertions "have no merit" and that it intended to fight the assertions in court. The files are already subject to an order from a California court, which would restrict them from being published in the US. Facebook has already called on the DCMS committee to both avoid reviewing the documents and to bring them back to either Facebook or its legal counsel. However, it's not certain that Facebook can actually force this since Parliament was acting under its own jurisdiction. The rest of this story can be found on OUR FORUM.  Microsoft’s current market cap has overtaken Apple’s, after living for nearly a decade in the shadow of the Cupertino company. At the time of writing Microsoft’s intra-day Market Cap is now 751.88B, higher than competing company Apple Inc. which is now 749.75B, by more than 2 billion dollars. Amazon (currently 741.90B) and Apple were dubbed the world’s most valuable tech companies by Market Cap earlier this year as they crossed the $1 trillion mark. With Microsoft now overshadowing all three, including Alphabet Inc, the firm now looks to be the most valuable tech company of the Silicon Valley giants. As can be seen from the graph, the last time Apple and Microsoft’s market capitalization came close to each other was way back in 2010. Investors are concerned about slowing revenue growth at the so-called FANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and Google), a club of high flyers Microsoft has traditionally been excluded from. Now they are betting company spending on cloud services and software will remain strong as companies strive to increase efficiency and productivity, while Facebook and Google are increasingly coming under scrutiny for their consumer data practices. See the graph and read more on OUR FORUM. |
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