Publishing v. Amazon
God everything to say has been said except maybe this:
a. People, stop, stop, stop talking about what does and does not violate the antitrust laws unless you actually have a clue. It's a complicated question. It frequently takes years, hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, and a few annoying economists to get a judge and/or a jury to figure it out. The cut and dried cases are not the only ones and they are few and far between. "Monopoly" is a term of art, as is "market power," and they do not mean what you think they mean.
b. Amazon is not trying to save the people from expensive ebooks. It's trying to negotiate from a position of power by leveraging market power in one market to gain an advantage negotiating with suppliers in a related market in which it would like to gain power at two different stages of the distribution chain.
c. Generally, as a matter of fucking law, a producer's "monopoly" in its own product is not the kind of "monopoly" the Sherman and Clayton Acts are concerned with--i.e., of fucking course Coke has a monopoly in Coke products. Significance to the antitrust laws? Not a damned thing without a picture of what products are reasonably interchangeable with Coke products. And "reasonably interchangeable" is not defined by "but I like Coke better than Pepsi."
GOD I wish I had more time to blog about this. I wonder if I would need to run a conflict check first. But I've got antitrust books to edit and antitrust briefs to write. Which is more important to my continued employment (if less conducive to my satisfying my "SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET" need to speak) than the question of "who is the bad guy" in this debacle, and, you know, gotta pay the mortgage, gotta buy the boy some eats, gotta save for taxes and college.
Feh. I hate having things to say and no time to say them.
PS: Rupert doesn't always win. Google "News America," "Valassis," and "settlement."
a. People, stop, stop, stop talking about what does and does not violate the antitrust laws unless you actually have a clue. It's a complicated question. It frequently takes years, hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, and a few annoying economists to get a judge and/or a jury to figure it out. The cut and dried cases are not the only ones and they are few and far between. "Monopoly" is a term of art, as is "market power," and they do not mean what you think they mean.
b. Amazon is not trying to save the people from expensive ebooks. It's trying to negotiate from a position of power by leveraging market power in one market to gain an advantage negotiating with suppliers in a related market in which it would like to gain power at two different stages of the distribution chain.
c. Generally, as a matter of fucking law, a producer's "monopoly" in its own product is not the kind of "monopoly" the Sherman and Clayton Acts are concerned with--i.e., of fucking course Coke has a monopoly in Coke products. Significance to the antitrust laws? Not a damned thing without a picture of what products are reasonably interchangeable with Coke products. And "reasonably interchangeable" is not defined by "but I like Coke better than Pepsi."
GOD I wish I had more time to blog about this. I wonder if I would need to run a conflict check first. But I've got antitrust books to edit and antitrust briefs to write. Which is more important to my continued employment (if less conducive to my satisfying my "SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET" need to speak) than the question of "who is the bad guy" in this debacle, and, you know, gotta pay the mortgage, gotta buy the boy some eats, gotta save for taxes and college.
Feh. I hate having things to say and no time to say them.
PS: Rupert doesn't always win. Google "News America," "Valassis," and "settlement."