This was something we expected to see some time ago.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205207895An antitrust lawsuit filed against Apple on Dec. 31 charges the company with maintaining an illegal monopoly on the digital music market.
Plaintiff Stacie Somers, alleges that Apple dominates the market for online video, online music, and digital music players and that its dominance constitutes a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
The attorneys are seeking to have their lawsuit certified as a class action.
"Apple has engaged in tying and monopolizing behavior, placing unneeded and unjustifiable technological restrictions on its most popular products in an effort to restrict consumer choice, and to restrain what little remains of its competition in the digital music markets," the complaint states.
The complaint against Apple claims that the company controls 75% of the online video market, 83% of the online music market, more than 90% of the hard-drive based music player market, and 70% of the Flash-based music player market.
The complaint takes issue with Apple's refusal to support the Windows Media Audio format.
Apple, for its part, might reasonably claim it doesn't want to license WMA from Microsoft, a cost the complaint speculates is unlikely to exceed $800,000, or 3 cents per iPod sold in 2005.
But the complaint goes beyond software licensing politics and charges Apple with deliberately designing its iPod hardware to be incompatible with WMA.
As for the injury to consumers, the complaint says that Apple's pricing is "monopolistic, excessive, and arbitrary," citing how a wholesale $5.52 price difference between 1-Gbyte ($4.15) and 4-Gbyte ($9.67) NAND flash memory modules results in a $100 retail price difference between 1-Gbyte iPod Nano and a 4-Gbyte Nano.
To buttress its antitrust claims under U.S. law, the complaint points to the fact that European antitrust authorities have taken issue with the way Apple operates its iPod and iTunes Music Store ecosystem.
Apple has always been robust in defending it's artificialy created pseudo-monopoly, lets see what the courts make of it
