Apple’s antitrust compliance program has improved, but the company continues to impede a court-appointed monitor overseeing the program, acting as “its own worst enemy,” the monitor told a federal judge in a report made public on Tuesday.
According to Reuters (http://tinyurl.com/ourjomn), Michael Bromwich, who was assigned to monitor Apple’s internal antitrust policies after U.S. District Judge Denise Cote found the company liable for conspiring to raise e-book prices, said Apple persisted in raising objections to his requests for information.
“In this respect, Apple has been its own worst enemy,” he said. “This lack of cooperation has cast an unnecessary shadow over meaningful progress in developing a comprehensive and effective antitrust compliance program.”
In March a three judge panel in the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York questioned (http://bit.ly/1GFfgco) some of the actions Bromwich has taken in his role as a court appointed monitor inside Apple. Bromwich was assigned the task following Judge Denise Cote’s ruling that Apple engaged in antitrust violations as part of a conspiracy to artificially raise the price of ebooks.
Apple claims that Bromwich “is conducting a roving investigation that is interfering with Apple’s business operations, risking the public disclosure of privileged and confidential information, and imposing substantial and rapidly escalating costs on Apple that it will never be able to recover,” even if it wins its appeal. Apple also alleges that the monitorship, as it is being interpreted and implemented by Bromwich, is unconstitutional.