Apple and Amazon formed mobile phone cartel: claim
 

Designed to keep Apple gear prices high

A new antitrust lawsuit is accusing Apple and Amazon of rigging the market to keep the price of iPhone and iPads high.

The class-action comes from law firm Hagens Berman and claims the pair colluded illegally to unfairly reduce or eliminate competition from third-party merchants on the Amazon Marketplace.

Hagens Berman has been rather good at getting Apple to settle some of its allegations. The law firm claims that Apple and Amazon signed an agreement in 2019 which allowed Apple to limit the number of resellers on the Amazon Marketplace while Amazon kept receiving iPhones and iPads at a discounted wholesale rate, enabling it to unfairly take over the market.

Prior to this agreement, there were over 600 resellers of iPhones and iPads, but only seven remained after it, a drastic reduction of 98 per cent. Meanwhile, Amazon became the dominant reseller of Apple products, even though it was a small player at the start.

https://fudzilla.com/news/mobile/558...e-cartel-claim