No company likes to be on the receiving end of an antitrust suit by the Department of Justice, but Apple is having trouble hiding its contempt for the government’s case against it over an alleged e-book price-fixing conspiracy. Apple’s formal response to the charges, filed with the court last week, all but ridicules the government’s theory of the case and the work of the Justice Department lawyers who put it together. It accuses the government of “siding with monopoly, rather than competition, in brining [the]case,” and ignoring the “simple and incontrovertible fact [that] before 2010, there was no real competition [in the e-book market] there was only Amazon.” Ouch. Even as Apple’s lawyers were filing their takedown of the Justice Department, however, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, was quietly slipping into Washington, DC, to begin a charm offensive on Capitol Hill, where the company finds itself facing growing scrutiny, over its privacy practices and other policies. In meetings with the majority and minority leaders of both the House and Senate, Cook reportedly did not bring up the antitrust case. But I doubt the timing of his visit was a coincidence.
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