Apple Fined In Taiwan For iPhone Price Fixing 74
Frankie70 writes "Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission has hit Apple with a small fine and warned the company that it may face a more substantial penalty if it doesn't stop interfering with carriers' iPhone pricing and the prices of the plans carriers sell alongside the iPhone. 'Through the email correspondence between Apple and these three telecom companies we discovered the companies submit their pricing plans to Apple to be approved or confirmed before the products hit the market,' Taiwan's FTC said in a statement."
Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Resistance to what exactly? I see this is as a token gesture because we all know that in most nations the MSRP really means "you won't sell this for less." The problem for electronics manufacturers is that with global markets you can have a lot of variability that makes it more feasible to buy in one nation for a lower price and sell it in another for a higher price. That's why we have Blu-Ray/DVD Region Codes and Cell phones that have regional lock-in.
Re:Nice (Score:2, Insightful)
And exactly why shouldn't a company be allowed to decide how much its product should cost?
It's not like Apple has a monopoly.
Re:Nice (Score:0, Insightful)
Taiwan needs to realize that Apple is probably working in the best interest of the consumer and making sure the carriers are not going to gouge the shit out of them. If Taiwan (all countries) really cared about consumers, then they would mandate that carriers can no longer sell phones and that all networks will be BYOD only.
Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
The iPhone doesn't have anything even approaching a monopoly. Just buy an Android unit. Or a Windows unit. I like Apple's stuff, but it's not $500 better, for my needs, than my cheap Android phone. I'm all for banning monopolistic practices, but pricing agreements for a popular but non-monopoly product in a very competitive market are not a problem.
Re:Nice (Score:3, Insightful)
Price-fixing is artificially keeping a product's cost higher than the product is worth via collusion. Display manufacturers, various entertainment stores (Sam Goody), and memory makers have done this a lot in the past.
The opposite of price-fixing is negotiating a deal so carriers cannot charge a higher price on the iPhone than the iPhone's going rate in that region. Carriers want to carry the iPhone, but they also want to charge much more than the MSRP for the iPhone. Apple says, "You can't do both!"
Basically, the carriers in taiwan want to engage in price-fixing for the iPhone, but the agreement they willingly made with Apple prevents it.
Re:Nice (Score:4, Insightful)
Region locks prevent consumers from benefiting from "Globalization" even though companies can exploit it at will. If i can get a legal DVD from China for around a dollar and it has an english soundtrack why shouldn't I be able to import these back? Isn't this the same mechanism outsourcing uses (jobs to where labour is cheap, but yet you cant reimport the cheap products back)?