Antitrust

Why the market shrugged off the Apple antitrust suit

Shares opened higher, despite news the company may have stepped in legal quicksand

Having Justice Department lawyers around, veteran tech watcher Dana Blankenhorn reminds us in a Seeking Alpha post this morning, "is bad for any company. Especially antitrust lawyers. Especially tech companies."

"Every tech company the Justice Department has ever gone after -- IBM (IBM), the former AT&T (T), and (most especially) Microsoft (MSFT) can attest to this fact. All were transformed and MORE

Why Apple is telling the DOJ: 'We'll see you in court'

The settlement the Justice Department is seeking could shutter the iBookstore

Reuters and Bloomberg have both reported -- citing a pair of unnamed sources -- that Apple (AAPL) and one or two major publishers are preparing to get sued for antitrust violations, perhaps as early as today.

Three of the five publishers accused of colluding with Apple to fix the prices of e-books have reportedly accepted deals offered by the European Commission and MORE

The Justice Department finally catches up to Steve Jobs

Warns Apple and five book publishers that they are about be sued for collusion

The late Steve Jobs was never one to worry much about antitrust laws.

He made a casual agreement with Google (GOOG) in 2008 not to poach one anothers' top employees that U.S. regulators saw as an illegal attempt to hold down wages. In early 2010 he devised a subscription model for iPad magazines that put draconian restrictions on MORE

6 reasons Google could save Yahoo

These days, Yahoo seems to be more about generating rumors than solid prospects for the future. So why would Google ever want to risk getting involved? Here are six potential reasons.

By Kevin Kelleher, contributor

FORTUNE -- If a company stays on the auction block long enough, rumors about its fate will eventually begin to repeat themselves. In 2008, while Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang insisted the web giant wasn't for sale, Microsoft MORE

Google gave 'the ultimatum only a monopolist can give'

What Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told the Senate antitrust panel about Google

As feared, the Senate hearings Wednesday on "The Power of Google: Serving Customers or Threatening Competition?" barely scratched the surface.

What Google (GOOG) did to Apple (AAPL) -- copying Apple's touchscreen operating system and offering it to Apple's competitors for free -- never came up. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) used much of their time to suck up to Google MORE

The antitrust case against Google

The Senate hearings scheduled for Wednesday will only scratch the surface

Apple (AAPL) is conspicuously absent from the witness list for Wednesday's hearing on "The Power of Google" before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition and Consumer Rights. Yelp! and Nextag will be represented, but Google (GOOG) has stepped on a lot more toes than theirs to maintain and extend its dominance of the Internet's sustaining source of revenue -- advertising MORE

Judge orders Steve Jobs to appear

Apple's CEO will have to answer questions in a six-year-old iTunes monopoly suit

In Nov. 2010, plaintiffs in the long-running "Apple iPod iTunes Anti-Trust Litigation" class-action lawsuit asked the presiding judge for permission to depose Steve Jobs. Apple's (AAPL) lawyers promptly filed for a protective order preventing the deposition.

What happened next is a little hard to follow, since so many of the relevant court documents are either redacted or sealed. But MORE

The iPhone as Barbie Doll

The New York Times reaches for new metaphors to illuminate the power of Apple's platform

The U.S. interstate highway system is a "platform," writes Steve Lohr in Sunday's New York Times business section. "The more that people traveled it, the more opportunity it created for businesses and towns linked to its transportation network — and the larger the market for Detroit automakers."

A Barbie doll, one of his sources suggests MORE

EU opens formal investigation into Google

Questions whether the Google has abused its dominance in online search.

The European Commission launched an investigation today to discern whether Google (GOOG) "imposes exclusivity obligations on advertising partners, preventing them from placing certain types of competing ads on their websites, as well as on computer and software vendors, with the aim of shutting out competing search tools," it said in a statement this morning.

Microsoft Corp. service Ciao, price comparison site MORE

Probing the Apple antitrust probes

Apple is likely to duck these bullets, say two analysts, but every case increases its risk

Absent a "smoking gun," neither the Federal Trade Commission nor the Department of Justice is likely to take Apple (AAPL) to court for antitrust violations, according to a note to clients issued Friday by Stifel Nicolas's Rebecca Arbogast and George Askew.

Apple has credible justifications, they write, for both complaints that have been lodged against it: MORE