The US Supreme Court will look into the class action suit against Apple on 3 December, Reuters reported. The suit, brought by iPhone users in a California federal court in 2011, alleges Apple forced consumers to pay too much for apps bought on its App store.
Apple has denied it engaged in anti-competitive behaviour, saying the prices for apps were set by app developers. But the suit said Apple collected the payments from iPhone users, keeping a 30 percent commission on each transaction. One area of dispute in the case is whether app developers recoup the cost of that commission by passing it on to consumers.
The company told the justices in legal papers that siding with the iPhone users who filed the lawsuit would threaten the growing field of e-commerce. The plaintiffs, as well as antitrust watchdog groups, said a decision for Apple would undermine antitrust enforcement and allow monopolistic behaviour to expand unchecked.
The plaintiffs were backed by 30 state attorneys general, including from Texas, California and New York. The plaintiffs said app developers would be unlikely to sue Apple, which controls the service where they make money, leaving no one to challenge anti-competitive conduct.
The company sought to have the antitrust claims dismissed, arguing that the plaintiffs lacked the required legal standing to bring the lawsuit. A federal judge in Oakland, California threw out the suit, saying the consumers were not direct purchasers because the higher fees they paid were passed on to them by the developers. But the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals revived the case last year, finding that Apple was a distributor that sold iPhone apps directly to consumers.
