Dam right!!!
Except Apple's principle is "charge as much as we possibly can and make sure the people selling stuff at a reasonable price get shut out"
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Apple Found Guilty of Conspiring to Fix Prices in E-Book Trial [Updated]
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Except Apple's principle is "charge as much as we possibly can and make sure the people selling stuff at a reasonable price get shut out"
Right. And I don't think they could or would succeed and the second they did - it is highly likely that another company would begin its ascent.
Or Amazon would be broken apart by the government before that point.
So buy from Amazon. What's the problem? This is what competition looks like.
The alternative is that Amazon is the only place that sells books, and you can't find lower prices at another store because there is no other store. That's not competition.
you dont get it. Amazon sells ebooks AT A LOSS, which means they drive out valid competition selling items for, you know, a profit. once they have insulated themselves from all serious competition then they can control the market price however they wish, at the consumer's detriment.
Think legal to start with, then innovation would be a good second runner up.
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Price fixing.
Sure. But that has nothing to do with the post that you were responding to. It was a response to the fact that Apple's prices are higher than Amazon after the settlements that eliminated the agency pricing.
Amazon has nothing to do with Apple's, according to the verdict, illegal prize fixing. It's quite typical, in any case, where people who disagree tend to blame it on someone totally different and come along with all kind of totally irrelevant examples of what 'others do' in a simplistic attempt to make the verdict look unjustified, hypocrite, false or an mixture of that.
I'm sure Amazon fanboys will do the same when Amazon would be found guilty, by dragging Apple in all of it....
I predicted the outcome as much, particularly after the publishers caved. They had much more to lose than Apple (for whom whatever the judgment is will likely be a rounding error in the earnings report). For Apple it was a long shot, but one worth taking since a win would reinforce their business model.
Antitrust laws are less strictly enforced in the US than Europe, but, much to the surprise of many people, there's more to the "rest of the world" than Europe. They are hardly enforced at all in places like South Korea and Japan. That's how they have massive chaebol and keiretsu like Samsung in the first place. That's perhaps too far in the other extreme (bordering on mercantilism), but it's incorrect to say that the US has the most lax antitrust laws.
In any case, just because a philosophy is old doesn't mean it's invalid. Democracy predates the divine right of kings. Capitalism predates communism.
I'm skeptical of anti-trust law in general, but even in practice, liberal Democrats like Chuck Schumer were also skeptical of the DOJ raising this particular case in the first place. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303740704577527211023581798.html
On top of that, I don't want to see Apple hobbled by a nosy "monitor" looking to "prevent" future violations. They tend to go far beyond their remit. As much as we complain about Microsoft, undoubtedly they were hobbled as much or more by the consent order than the actual changes to the Windows licenses. It wouldn't surprise me if the scrutiny drove Bill Gates to an early retirement, saddling the company with the uninspiring Steve Ballmer.
So when you walk into a grocery store, I hope you ask the manager to point out the loss leaders so you can avoid them. Right?
I also think that Apple is in the wrong, i don't think Apple went to al publishers and helped with the conspiracy, it did however provide a platform for it and forced the publishers via the most favorabel nation clausule.
I and many others come to this site because we like/use/own Apple *products*. I didn't know supporting AAPL when they are convicted (and looking at everything presented so far, rightly so) of violating anti-trust laws was also a requisite condition for membership. After all, you are the one who dictates the conditions.
In terms of the Sherman Act, mainly by interpretation. The act prohibited collusion and conspiracy to collude.
It helps to understand the actions of the Standard Oil Company and the railroads during the 1870s and 1880s, as this is the activity that led to the adoption of the Sherman Act. In particular Standard created secret "combines" to favor themselves and their partners (many of them unwilling).
I was referring to the screeching of FANBOY FANBOY FANBOOOOOOY every three seconds.
Screaming fanboy every time someone defends the company, ESPECIALLY on this kind of site, is silly. When it's done instead of addressing thoughtful comments about skepticism of the application of anti-trust law, it's just petty and juvenile.
Apple didn't collude with Amazon.
Publishers may or may not have colluded with each other.
Apple simply offered publishers a deal that they liked better than the one Amazon was offering. This is how competition is supposed to work. They liked the deal so much that they may have put pressure on each other to go along with it, and pressure on Amazon to renegotiate the deal they had with Amazon. But, somehow, somebody got it in their head that Apple did something wrong.
Basically if anyone did anything wrong, it's the publishers. But they settled, so we'll never really know. Meanwhile Apple gets caught up in the middle of it, when the net result of their actions was to create greater competition in the marketplace, and the breaking up of Amazon's monopoly.
I assume your implied disdain of that statement is based on the same experience?
I think that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that my null position of a significant and major type of *law* not being "arbitrary" requires far less justification than his.