Apple and Amazon are accused of conspiring to keep iPhone and iPad prices high

Famous American companies Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc were accused of conspiring in order to deliberately raise prices of new iPhone and iPad models. The basis for a formal complaint was deletion of almost all Apple product resellers from the Amazon e-commerce platform.

A class action lawsuit filed against the companies in Seattle federal court as evidence of their unfair arrangement uses the agreement dated back to January 2019, which states that Apple offered Amazon discounts for its products of up to 10% in exchange for limitation in the number of competing resellers on the platform, thereby significantly lowering natural competition in the market.

Thus, Amazon became a leading service of reselling new iPhone and iPad models, although previously it sold only a limited number of the company’s products, among which were even fakes. 

Not only discounts on Apple’s new products, which used to be quite common, disappeared from the service, but also their price increased by more than 10%.

The class action lawsuit filed against the companies’ current policy emphasizes the unacceptability of such limitation of competition and unreasonable increase in prices, thereby requiring taking measures under the U.S. antitrust laws.