Stefan Mileschin

Can it ever change its spots?

Convicted monopolist Apple has been accused of being up to its old tricks after Japanese tech company Rakuten, best known for its TV streaming service, filed an anti-competition complaint against Apple with the European Commission.

Rakuten's complaint doesn't focus on streaming, but rather on Apple's ebook business which is where Apple’s last game of monopoly was played. For those who don’t remember, Apple messiah Steve Jobs set up an illegal cartel with a group of publishers which was designed to raise the cost of books for Apple victims customers and damage Amazon’s business. Despite clearly being in the wrong, and its co-conspirators confessing, Apple denied it ever did anything wrong and appealed all the way to the Supreme Court (which denied its final appeal).

Rakuten owns an ereader company called Kobo, whose app is hosted on Apple's App Store.Any app on the App Store which uses in-app payments has to use Apple's payment system, which charges up to a 30 percent levy on each purchase. For Kobo, this means if it wanted to sell books through its free app it would have to pay a 30 percent commission on every book sold.

https://fudzilla.com/news/51014-appl...ly-allegations