Apple Articles • Software Expert Witnesses & Litigation Consultants

January 14, 2020 • by Quandary Peak Research

U.S. Department of Justice Mandates Changes to eSim Technology

The Justice Department (DOJ) has concluded an investigation into collusion between two wireless carriers and a related trade association regarding embedded SIM card (eSIM) technology. AT&T, Verizon, and the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (or GSMA) were the subjects of the DOJ investigation that will yield changes to how eSIM standards…

A Closer Look at the Antitrust Debate in the Technology Sector

The biggest and most influential technology companies – Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon – were once the darlings of Wall Street, the media, and consumers. But the tone has decisively shifted in recent months. Most news reporting focuses on data impropriety, privacy issues, and, increasingly, the pure size and scope of the…

Data’s Role in Big Tech’s Antitrust Fight

The era of minimal oversight for the biggest technology companies appears to be ending. The Justice Department and FTC will split oversight of Google and Amazon, and the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead to a long-simmering antitrust suit against Apple. Taken together, it is becoming clear that lawmakers are poised to take…

Supreme Court Allows Apple Antitrust Suit to Move Forward

A long-simmering lawsuit has been given the go-ahead by the Supreme Court. Apple Inc. v. Pepper, a major antitrust suit with enormous implications for how the tech giant does business, was allowed to proceed in a 5-to-4 vote from the highest court in the land. While antitrust cases are typically long, protracted…

Legal Troubles Don’t Mean Diminished Ambitions for Big Tech

Big Tech took some unprecedented hits in 2018. For the first time in memory, previously unassailable companies found themselves squarely in government and public crosshairs alike, answering for a series of (often data-centric) misdeeds. But even as questions loom and skepticism increases, these issues – and the ensuing public backlash – remain…

Amazon, Apple, Bloomberg, and…Chinese Spies?

The story feels like something out of a novel or a movie. In October, Bloomberg Businessweek published a lengthypiecedetailing how Chinese spies had, during the manufacturing process, installed chips in servers purchased by major tech companies—creating “a stealth doorway” into their respective networks. The report alleged that two of the companies were…

The End of Apple and Samsung’s Patent Wars

Samsung and Apple Inc.’s seven-year legal battle over smartphone patents has finally reached a resolution. The companies agreed to an undisclosed settlement at the end of June, resolving the most prominent of several lawsuits, in which Apple alleged that Samsung had “slavishly” copied the design of Apple’s vaunted iPhone. The cases played…

Facebook’s Data-Sharing Partnerships and the Limits of Privacy Protections

Our world runs increasingly on data. Concurrent with the rise of tools developed to analyze and glean insights from massive reams of information is the ascendance of data as a kind of currency—an aggregation of potential insights to help companies sell products, services, and more. Tech giants like Amazon, Google, Apple, and…

Europe’s Regulator Extraordinaire: Margrethe Vestager

Data is currency for the biggest tech companies in the world. Apple, Facebook, Google, and other giants have predicated extremely successful business models around harvesting and leveraging data from their users. But recent scandals involving misuse of data have caught the public’s attention, leading to questions about how user information is collected…

Jury Finds Apple Infringed Smartphone Patent

A patent trial in the District of Delaware between MobileMedia Ideas (MMI) and Apple ended with a jury finding of infringement by Apple and an award of $3 million to MMI. The patent at issue, U.S. Patent No. RE 39,231, described the invention of the “polite ignore” feature on cell phones for…