Court-appointed antitrust monitor says Apple won't play nice

Apple ebooks books
That's it, we're switching back to leather-bound

Apple was found guilty in 2013 of conspiring with book publishers to fix the prices of ebooks, but now it's having a hard time dealing with its punishment, according to one lawyer.

The Department of Justice in August revealed its plan to stop Apple from repeating its mistakes, and it included requiring the company to pay for an external monitor to oversee its future antitrust compliance policies.

A court made that official in October, and former Assistant US Attorney and Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich was assigned to the task.

But on December 30 he filed with the court to complain that Apple won't cooperate.

The Bromwich Declaration

In November Apple moaned that Bromwich's attorney fees were excessive, while the lawyer complained that Apple was ignoring his requests for meetings.

And in December Apple asked a Manhattan judge to put a stop to Bromwich's monitoring until its appeal goes through the system.

But now Bromwich has laid out his complaints in full in an official document titled The Bromwich Declaration.

Apparently so far Bromwich and his team have only been allowed to meet with one board member and one senior executive, and seven of the 11 people they have met with were themselves lawyers.

The meetings don't take place at Apple HQ, and Bromwich also said that his document requests have been largely ignored as well.

'Still a lot of anger'

"This is far less access than I have ever received during a comparable period of time in the three other monitorships I have conducted," he wrote.

He continued, "In my 20 years of doing oversight work, I have never before had the entity over which I was exercising oversight unilaterally dictate who could be interviewed, even in those instances in which I have dealt with very sensitive matters, including highly classified matters of national security."

Bromwich added that Apple's Director of Competition Law Kyle Andeer explained to him that executives are busy and that "a lot of anger" still exists within the company over this case.

Via The Wall Street Journal

Michael Rougeau

Michael Rougeau is a former freelance news writer for TechRadar. Studying at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Northeastern University, Michael has bylines at Kotaku, 1UP, G4, Complex Magazine, Digital Trends, GamesRadar, GameSpot, IFC, Animal New York, @Gamer, Inside the Magic, Comic Book Resources, Zap2It, TabTimes, GameZone, Cheat Code Central, Gameshark, Gameranx, The Industry, Debonair Mag, Kombo, and others.

Micheal also spent time as the Games Editor for Playboy.com, and was the managing editor at GameSpot before becoming an Animal Care Manager for Wags and Walks.