APPLE guilty on price fixing

[ebw]

famousringo said:

thranx said:

NiKKoM said:
Not good.. Amazon undercuts everyone hurting the writers and publishers.. books have been devalued a lot beause of Amazon.. won't be surprised if some publishers will go down..

if they dont like amazon prices they shouldn't do business with them.

That's actually what prompted the DoJ's whole investigation. Publishers tried to withhold books from Amazon unless they changed to the agency model. Amazon complained to the DoJ.

 

I might be able to get behind this ruling if the DoJ showed any signs at all of investigating Amazon for predatory pricing. Why the hell is the new entrant being investigated before the monopolist?

Oh, when the monopolist is forced to stop selling books below cost, the price of books goes up? How shocking. Barnes & Noble testified that Amazon's pricing scheme made competition impossible, and they planned to do the same thing Apple did: Change the business model to make competition possible again.

Now we have a competitive landscape where Amazon has been given a license from the DoJ to use predatory pricing to squeeze out competition in e-books, it can use its tax-evasion tactics to tighten its grip on paper books, and Amazon already has projects well underway to displace publishers from the value chain. The same clowns who have failed to prosecute a single banker over the economic collapse are handing over an entire medium to one company on a silver platter.

This seems to be a case of anti-trust law being too ham-fisted to suit its supposed purpose of improving competition.  According to Wikipedia, even conspiring to LOWER prices is considered illegal price-fixing, which sets a very low bar for the DoJ to pass.  On the other hand, successful cases against predatory pricing are few and far between.  In a way, Apple got punished for going vigilante to bust up the Amazon monopoly before the DoJ could be bothered to lift a finger.