Amazon Sending New Round of Credits to E-Book Buyers as Part of Apple Price Fixing Settlement

[bakerzdosen]

$2 and change added to my iTunes account.

 

[supercoolmanchu]

You must be joking: the DOJ had overwhelming evidence of the collusion, including emails and phone logs between all the actors involved proving a coordinated effort between them.

No. All they showed were separate negotiations between Apple and each publisher. The DOJ conflated a very few offhanded remarks into collusion. They had no proof of systemic price fixing coordination between publishers and Apple.

Again, corrupt government doing heavy business with Amazon, serious conflict of interest. What's also clear... Apple was never in a position of an ebook monopoly, so what exactly was the DOJ doing besides helping Amazon maintain their total market dominance? Funny how those government anti-trust efforts always seem so wildly uneven.

Amazon could have filed their own suit, but instead used their influence to push the government to do their dirty work. IF were pretending that the DOJ has any integrity... then we can imagine all sorts of arguments to fit your reasoning, but we have to start from the foundation and that institution, and at that time, was behaving shady AF.

 

[kingpushup]

Or maybe it actually does enrich the conversation by providing an alternative point of view to consider, unless you expect everyone to take your equally speculative claim that "this was good for Amazon, not for customers or writers or the industry" as the factual truth when there is no such factual basis presented.


Apple was unwilling to compete on price. It's fine with me, but the alternative is not to fix the price so that you cannot get a cheaper deal from competitors, the alternative is to offer better value and let the consumers decide whether they value your offer enough to justify the higher price tag.

Furthermore, I don't see how Apple "brought a better product" when the vast majority of ebooks were basically the same, Apple's ebooks were and still are not available on any epaper ebook reader and iBooks being worse or better than e.g. the Kindle App is pretty debatable.


Learned what? A very big part of this "high competition" you praise is price, which is exactly what Apple sought to remove from the equation in the ebooks market by enforcing the same price everywhere. Following your reasoning, you should actually "thank goodness" the Apple deal was declared illegal since competitiveness apparently works much better without fixed prices (which should be obvious...).

Furthermore, under the model from Apple there was no such thing as higher margins except for Apple itself. Publishers and writers were earning more under the wholesale model from Amazon. This was confirmed by the publishers themselves as far as I remember. The whole deal was not an attempt of the publishers to earn more money, it was an attempt to keep the perceived value of books artificially high even if it actually meant lower revenues from ebooks.

As a side note, Spotify is accusing Apple of anticompetitive behavior, with an ongoing FTC investigation and a complaint filed to the EU antitrust commission, so at least one of the key actors of the eco-system feels Apple is misbehaving in the music industry too.

Amazon still had choice on price but before Apple’s ebooks marketplace, the publishers saw no choice on price. Apple saw the win, but Steve worked in private to deliver the big reveal.

US antitrust seeks to produce stable robust marketplaces by protecting open dialogue particularly where there is a hegemon like Amazon or Apple or ... and as such Apple has learned to work in public to earn co-signers on open letters and “friends of the court” in suits, which deliver similar coalescing opinions as Apple had reached in private with the publishers.

Your ideas are appreciated, by me at least. From my experience, Apple offered a slightly higher quality platform, while Amazon delivered slightly better on cost. Value is in the eye of the beholder, of course; nonetheless, competition between both Apple and Amazon would have improved cost and quality for consumers. This article reminds me how a few customers won back a few bucks, but the marketplace lost for lack of competition - for years now only stagnation.

Spotify may be beyond the scope of this article, but tactful for sure that you raise the subject in reply to my comments about Apple’s ventures into marketplaces and about the results. So, here’s my reply, in kind: (1) I have appreciated the entire music industry’s wake up call to be more assertive and competitive in deliveries on quality and cost. (2) I hope that Apple and Spotify are curating the music marketplace with sufficiently open air pro-choice manners, because I want to see this competition continue. I am pro-consumer and pro-innovation, and I sense and hope that you are too.

 

[bsolar]

No. All they showed were separate negotiations between Apple and each publisher. The DOJ conflated a very few offhanded remarks into collusion. They had no proof of systemic price fixing coordination between publishers and Apple.

The DOJ evidence was far from "very few offanded remarks", it was actually pretty strong.

Again, corrupt government doing heavy business with Amazon, serious conflict of interest. What's also clear... Apple was never in a position of an ebook monopoly, so what exactly was the DOJ doing besides helping Amazon maintain their total market dominance? Funny how those government anti-trust efforts always seem so wildly uneven.

You are claiming the government conspired together with Amazon to damage Apple. This claim is pure speculation without any evidence backing it up. Furthermore, the antitrust violations were about collusion and price fixing, not abuse of dominant position. Your arguing about monopolies is a straw man.

Amazon could have filed their own suit, but instead used their influence to push the government to do their dirty work. IF were pretending that the DOJ has any integrity... then we can imagine all sorts of arguments to fit your reasoning, but we have to start from the foundation and that institution, and at that time, was behaving shady AF.

The idea that the DOJ has no integrity is a claim you are making without providing any factual argument. Again, it's pure speculation, so no sorry but the foundation you suggest is by any means not the one we should start from, especially since there is a far simpler option: that Apple was ruled to have infringed antitrust law because it actually did.

Furthermore, even assuming your baseless speculation true, even the DOJ acting without integrity wouldn't make the rulings incorrect: for your conspiracy to work you need the DOJ, the US District Court Judge , the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals and even the Supreme Court as conspirators... Sorry but Occam's Razor doesn't swing that way.
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(1) I have appreciated the entire music industry’s wake up call to be more assertive and competitive in deliveries on quality and cost. (2) I hope that Apple and Spotify are curating the music marketplace with sufficiently open air pro-choice manners, because I want to see this competition continue. I am pro-consumer and pro-innovation, and I sense and hope that you are too.

I actually think Apple lost a great opportunity with ebooks but due to their strategic choices, not because the antitrust law was unfair or the rulings were wrong. Apple had absolutely the potential to become a key player in the ebooks market through fair competition, winning market share through great deals, innovative models and maybe even killer devices.

 

[nia820]

I got $3.44. I don't know what to do with myself. So much money.