If you’ve looked into buying a new iPhone lately, you’ll know that you must choose how to pay for the phone initially: you can buy it unlocked for the full-price, or you can get the phone through a carrier contract and initially pay a much smaller price while you pay off the price of the device in monthly installments. Apple uses a similar purchase model in other countries, but at least one, namely Japan, has found something wrong with it.
According to Engadget, the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC), an antitrust regulatory agency, launched an investigation into four of Apple’s sales practices in that country. The JFTC found an issue with Apple’s requirement that service providers offer subsidies on the iPhone price, alleging anticompetitiveness.
The JFTC argues that requiring that certain service providers lower the cost of the phone hurts competition because it leads to “higher-priced monthly service plans and no choice for consumers to instead pay more up front and less each month,” as Engadget explains. Apple has contracts that require such subsidies with Japanese service providers NTT Docomo, KDDI, and SoftBank.
Apple will change the contracts from now on. Carriers will still provide subsidized plans, but Japanese customers will now be offered a separate option: no subsidies, but lower monthly charges.
In other iPhone news, Apple is rumored to be releasing three new iPhones later this year. It’s still unclear exactly which models the tech company will release, but some reports predicted at least two new models would include OLED screens. That prediction lines up with another recent report that noted Apple will begin using LG Display as a “second supplier” of OLED panels as part of a new million dollar deal that will see Apple obtained three to five million OLED screens.
