Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
1- Most price fixing conspiracies are settled because of the Prisoner's Dilema. The first to settle gets off lightly and the last gets hammered.
2- If Apple's legal counsel told them a hub-and-spoke conspiracy was not a violation of antitrust they should have been fired on the spot. Possibly disbarred for incompetence. It is a textbook example of the kind of behavior antitrust was created to prevent. My suspicion is Jobs decided he was not going to settle a second antitrust lawsuit and everybody else has been stuck trying to follow through to protect their image. Hence the legally-weak, PR-focused filings. It's all about telling the faithful they are being victimized. It's their way of overturning the table, because neither the facts nor the law are on their side.
3- Companies have refused to settle antitrust cases before. None has done well. AT&T was destroyed until all that remains is the name. Microsoft was saddled with a monitor for years, billions of dollars of ambulance-chaser lawsuits and shakedowns. Conversely, when Apple quickly settled their first antitrust conspiracy case, it got buried so quickly most people don't even know it happened and think it's a bit of meaningless trivia instead of a context-setter for the current penalties trial.
They should have not launched the conspiracy simultaneously, that was arrogant and stupid. Having done that, and having been caught, they should have settled. Even now, they have the chance to minimize the damages by accepting they crossed the line. Or at least pretend they do.
That way they get to live and conspire another day.
Antitrust is not a rap you can beat.
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1. Thanks for putting a name to the prisoners' dilemma.
2. While I understand your arguments for what Apple should have done and why they were stupid not to have settled (and I appreciate the clarity with which you've made them), I need more background on past decisions to know whether the issue is
entirely that Apple's (and/or Jobs') choices were unwise or that the judge was unconscionably severe for career-making reasons. (I'm thinking of the publicity hound judge whose televised vow to inflict the severest sentence in the history of rape trials compelled Roman Polanski to flee the country -- not because he was unwilling to go to prison, but because the judge promised to send him there for longer than anyone who had ever committed the same sort of crime had served.) Of course, if Cote is truly that unreasonable, then that would have been even more reason to settle.
3. Thanks for the recap of precedents. Again, vividly and succinctly put.
I'd still like to compare the severity of those verdicts (and others) and the implementation of the judgments with Cote's.