It looks like Apple has been a bit naughty in Italy according to Reuters
and not been informing customers of their rights to product guarantees
and assistance. Not only that, but they encouraged customers to buy
their AppleCare Protection Plan, which actually overlapped with the free
assistance required by law. Italy's anti-trust body has been looking at
the activities of Apple Sales International, Apple Italia and Apple
Retail Italia and fined them for the above practices. They have now
fined Apple a total of 900,000 Euros over these shenanigans, which will
hopefully put a stop to this. Reuters tried having a chat with three
Apple spokesmen about this issue, but they were surprisingly elusive.
Separately, Apple faces an investigation over price-fixing deals with
ebook publishers, blocking rivals and hurting customers. But there's
more: EU anti-trust authorities are also looking closely at Apple's
patents dispute with Samsung, as they suspect that their intellectual
property rights may have been unfairly used against their rivals to
block sales. We reported on this previously, here, concluding that Apple will now have to actually compete in the marketplace, rather than muzzle their rivals. Oh, such a shame.
It does feel to us as if the departure of Steve Jobs has lead Apple to
try more underhand tactics than before. It's one thing to apply the
Reality Distortion Field, aka clever marketing and lock your products in
with DRM, but quite another to commit such obvious fraud against your
customers. It looks like Apple may have started, or will soon start to
haemorrhage customers and quite rightly, too.
Source
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