Slashdot Mirror
In Australia, Apple Fined $2.5 Million For '4G' Advertising Claims
Whiney Mac Fanboy writes "Apple has agreed to pay a $2.25 million (AUD) fine (along with 300k legal costs) to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission for misleading advertising. Apple misrepresented their iPad product as being a '4G' device, when in fact they're only compatible with a very small percentage of 4G networks around the world. The Age online has the full story."
10 minutes of iPad sales?
No, it's a rational observation that a fine must be meaningful to a corporation for it to have any hope of affecting change.
If the fine is too small (as fines generally are), it is dismissed as a simple cost of business. The immediate problem is remedied (so as not to piss off the authoritative body that caught them), but similar problems are guaranteed to arise again in the future. After all, if it wasn't profitable to break the law in the first place, the company wouldn't have done it. If the fine is going to be a small fraction of that profit each time, the smart business decision is to continue the practice of doing something which breaks the law, preparing for the inevitable "whoops - we'll fix that, your honor" for when someone catches on, and milking the ill-gotten profits until then.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
This is a consumer protection organisation. They don't give a fuck about your pedantic nitpicking. Australia has 4G* LTE networks. The iPad was advertised as supporting 4G* LTE networks. The iPad did not support Australia's 4G* LTE networks. Ergo, the iPad did not support 4G* LTE networks. End of story. The CONSUMER protection organisation should not have to give a fuck about whether it supports 4G* LTE somewhere else, the question is, could the advertising be expected to give a consumer a reasonable belief that it would work with their 4G* LTE service. The answer is yes, so Apple broke the law. That you believe this is somehow OK for Apple to market in such a misleading way is telling of how little your government protects your consumers, and how brainwashed your consumers are by your corporations.
* Whether LTE is actually 4G is not addressed by this post, and is beside this point for the purposes of this discussion.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Actually you have it backwards. There is a 4G standard definition for the rest of the world, then there is the US/Canada. Australia is not the odd one out here.
He probably does know. But he can't make a judgement based on what he "knows", only on the evidence that's been placed before him during the case. That's how the law works.