Antitrust lawsuit says Apple and Amazon colluded to raise iPhone, iPad prices

First sale doctrine is only for retail sales that have no contract outside the sale.

In distribution, contracts can absolutely dictate terms. This is a good thing. It lets, for instance, Boeing require purchasers to properly maintain airplanes (it hurts Boeing when they fall out of the sky). It also lets manufacturers offer lower prices on the condition that products be displayed or promoted in certain ways. This is very common in retail ("we'll give you 5% off quantity 100 on the condition they're promoted in ads and an endcap in each store").

The Apple / Amazon example is resale price maintenance. There's some good background on US law in the area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resale_price_maintenance#Unite...

In this specific example, where the claim is that Amazon and Apple colluded to raise prices by only allowing authorized Apple resellers on amazon.com, I guess I'm kind of sympathetic to Apple. At least inasmuch as they can show that sales from unauthorized resellers generate more warranty/support/other expense, or brand damage from even worse stuff like fraud and counterfeits.

It seems like the real complaint is with the resale price maintenance in Apple's authorized reseller program. Which may be a fair complaint. But why not go after that? If the price maintenance is illegal, it should be illegal everywhere, not just Amazon. And if it's legal, it should be legal on Amazon as well.

This is correct for used devices, or course, but people in the wholesale chain will have signed contracts agreeing not to sell below MSRP.

It’s called “undercutting the channel”, and it’s very frowned on in the physical goods distribution industry.

Because Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policies are one of the most common practices used by the large majority of consumer goods manufacturers and brands, especially in the electronics or higher end goods space.

Every retailer who is an authorized seller of a brand that employs a MAP policy has agreed to advertise/list/publish the product at a price no lower than MAP, or risk losing their reseller status. Note that I did not say they can't sell for a lower price, just that they cannot show a lower price to the general public to elicit a sale.

MAP is not just beneficial for the brand though, who's products remain priced accordingly to limits the brand has set; it's beneficial to the retailer who can count on a minimum set margin and not have to worry about being undercut by another retailer. It also benefits the end consumer by ensuring the retailer and brand retain enough margin on the sale to facilitate after-sale support and service as well provide the means to stay in business along with the benefit of helping to protect resale values (for applicable products). MAP policies themselves are fully legal under current anti-trust laws (in the US).

Do we still need sales reps for technology at this point? Is the value of it not plainly aware to the end user?

Retail middle men made sense in an era of vastly different solutions to logistics problems.

The USs problem is individuals are better at individual decision making but we have all these lifelong sales reps, wannabe thought leaders, and politically correct economic of a bygone era to validate.

Best Buy, for example, is a car dealership; a land owning rent seeker not inventing anything.

Apple is still on the hook to provide at least the bare minimum of support which costs Apple money.

...unless you have a contract with that retailer around the conditions of the sale, which Apple and lots of other big companies do with their bulk retailers.

If Apple comes to you and says "paxys, we just love you, we'll sell you everything for 50% off... but you have to sign a contract that you will only dispose of products by firing them into space", and you sign that contract, and they live up to the discount... surprise, you're on the hook for your part of the contact.

Apple has contracts with these resellers. It's called minimum advertised price (MAP) or retail price support. There is a long history of MAP/RPS being litigated in the US, and there are lots of twists and turns and valid opinions to be had.

But "first sale doctrine supersedes any contracts" is NOT correct.

I don't think they'd go down that path. Risk of ending up in the pile of corporations who have lost the fight against the law of first sale.

Why not? Apple isn't under any obligation to sell to anyone at a wholesale price, and can apply conditions via a contract when they do so.

Arizona iced tea even prints the price on the cans to prevent people from fucking with it.

ref. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/522/3.html

It happens to me all the time with non-Apple products. Always the same price, down to the penny. Pricing agreements between the manufacturer and their resellers seem to be pretty common.

If we're suddenly going to decide that's illegal, it will have a huge impact on the market.

After I fixed it I think in the first year it "made" Amazon $30M in lower payments to vendors(though it is hard to attribute exact monetary values due to complexity of the contracts)

But no one cared, I barely got any praise, no promo or anything. So I quit and went somewhere else.

I presume there would not be anything stopping the other websites from including the shipping prices?

Regardless, my point is if Amazon was not offering a seller a reasonable deal, they should just start their own website. The barrier to entry has never been lower in all of history.