geekosystem

A month ago, Apple and five other publishers were warned that the U.S. Department of Justice was seeking a case for collusion and price fixing regarding eBook prices. Now, it would seem those warnings weren't full of hot air, as the Department of Justice has officially filed a lawsuit against Apple, Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Penguin, claiming that these publishers colluded to fix eBook prices. Word on the people familiar with the matter street says Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and HarperCollins already settled their suits, but Apple and Macmillan have refused to engage in talks, and deny that they have participated in an collusion to fix eBook prices.

According to a report on The Wall Street Journal, the Department of Justice has taken notice of eBook publishing and pricing. Federal prosecutors have sent letters to Apple, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group, Macmillan, and HarperCollins, stating that the Department of Justice is seeking a case for collusion and price-fixing. Aside from potentially reading about a possibly long legal battle, what consumers could expect from this is, intriguingly, lower eBook prices.

As you may know, AT&T has had its sights set on T-Mobile for a while now, and the two had agreed that AT&T would be allowed to gobble up T-Mobile for a scant $39 billion. If you had your money on the merger getting blocked for antitrust violations, you were right. Today, the U.S. Government sued to block the merger on grounds that it would "substantially lessen competition," at which point AT&T's stock took a 5% hit. If the merger should happen to go through after all, we will see the birth of the largest mobile service provider in the United States.

Due to cancelation language written into the merger agreement, AT&T has some significant incentives to fight these antitrust allegations. If the deal fails to go through, AT&T owes T-Mobile a check for $3 billion and reduced charges for dialing into AT&Ts network as part of a package that's worth somewhere around $7 billion.

While today's youths probably think of Microsoft as having more indie cred than a megalithic, secretive tech company like, say, Apple, it was not always so: In the '90s, Microsoft was hounded by antitrust accusations, culminating in the landmark United States v. Microsoft case filed in 1998. While the judge in that case ultimately prescribed that Microsoft be split into two separate companies, one to produce the Windows operating system, one to produce other software, Microsoft's lawyers successfully appealed, and one component of the compromise reached was that the Department of Justice would stringently oversee Microsoft's activities via a three-person committee. This oversight commenced in 2002, following the final judgment on United States vs. Microsoft; on May 12th, it will come to an end following a meeting today at which the DoJ, 17 states, and the District of Columbia declined to object to that date. Ars: "There are unlikely to be any immediate implications for Microsoft, with the company saying that it will continue to abide by most of the terms of the settlement anyway ... Nonetheless, the removal of court oversight may allow the company to respond a little more quickly, and a little more aggressively, to the actions of its competitors." (via Ars Technica)

We already knew that the U.S. Justice Department was investigating whether Apple "unfairly dominates" the sale of digital music; contacting officials in the music industry as well as online music vendors. Now the New York Post's sources say that the probe is a bit broader than originally thought.

According to several sources, the Justice Dept. has contacted a handful of the country's biggest media and technology companies to get their views on Apple, which, after years of casting itself as the tiny outsider, has become an 800-pound gorilla calling the shots in several arenas.