You have to remember how to define the market. It is more going to be look at as ONLY online downloads which apple is at 70% of the market in that. 70% is by far large enough to strong arm everyone.
I don't see how. The consumer is able to get the same product from someone else quite easily. The law states quite clearly that if a company achieves a "monopoly" (and Apple has NOT done that) by purely popular means (i.e. consumers simply like getting the product best from that company) and they are not impeding others (anti-competition), then the monopoly is legal. Here we have a situation where Apple has the market purely by popularity. There is nothing stopping anyone from buying a digital download from someone like Amazon or from other companies from starting their own digital downloads (e.g. Walmart even tried it, but they didn't get any traction; whose fault is that, exactly?)
Whereas I get no choice at all about being able to buy my Mac hardware from anyone but Apple and this is purely an artificial construct (i.e. contract) and thus is 100% anti-competitive. Whereas here they have 70% of the digital download share, Apple has 100% of the hardware for OSX share. They have 91% of $1000+ hardware (
http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-has-91-of-market-for-1000-PCs-says-NPD/1248313624 ) and over 30% of the profit share of revenue (
http://www.businessinsider.com/char...erating-profit-share-of-top-pc-vendors-2010-3).
Thus once again, I say if the justice department is going to investigate Apple for antitrust violations on something where there IS consumer choice for the SAME EXACT PRODUCT, then surely they should be looking at Apple where it is stifling the consumer's choice of hardware completely (again for those that want OSX by either choice or need). If this was by design, it might be one thing, but there are no technical reasons OSX can't run on say a Dell computer (e.g. I'm running it on one myself).
That is the argument apple could try but at the same time if it is discovered that when the song is sold competing head to head with Amazon deal the lost sells is minor to apple then no real lost there.
Record companies are going to loss huge chunks of sells by going with Amazon and apple removing front page support. This is effectively keeping them from doing the deal with Amazon.
Remember Apple can not use its market power to keep competition from coming in. Right now consumers are getting screwed by how Apple is acting.
I don't follow what you are saying. Maybe you could restate it. It sounds like you're saying that Apple is threatening to remove "ads" for a given song or album off their store page if another company is allowed to sell the same song or album online. If that is the case and Apple is actually doing that, there might be a case as that is abusing market power (very similar to Microsoft refusing to sell at OEM rates to those that are selling machines with another OS installed on it and/or charging them a fee even if Windows wasn't on it). But beyond that, Apple is allowed to put on its store whatever it wants (e.g. a brick and mortar store might put a Led Zep poster on the wall; what has that got to do with anything? I go to a store to buy a song I'm looking for, not to browse ads).
The difference is that Apple has a small market share on all computers.
They have a small share of the overall installed *OS* market, but compared to other companies selling *HARDWARE*, their share is ANYTHING but small (see above links for Apple's profits in hardware compared to the competition and their share of $1000+ hardware). There's nothing "small" about them. The important thing here is to compare Apples to Apples (literally). You can say that buying a Windows machine is "equivalent functionality" but I think we both know that people don't buy a "Mac" because they think there's ANYTHING "equivalent" about the two operating systems. And if you already have a Mac software base or your company requires Mac software, you HAVE to buy Apple hardware whether you "like" what Apple has to offer (regardless of price, which is WAY high compared to the "competition" running another OS).
The point is if you are comparing music sales, you have to have pretty similar performance and the same song or it doesn't matter. MP3 and AAC are close enough in performance at 256kbit that they could be considered audibly equivalent and obviously the songs are the same. But if I compare a Mac Pro to a Dell Tower and they're not running the same software, that would be like comparing iTunes to Amazon but not looking at the same song. WTF is the point? That Dell hardware I desire (for either features or price) won't do me a bit of good if I need to run Final Cut Pro. They are simply NOT equivalent markets because they do not run/do the same thing. Apple is forbidding competition in their hardware market for OSX so they can keep ALL of the profits and THAT is why their profit margins are through the roof in the graph on that link above. They effectively have NO competition for hardware sales to those that want OSX.
If you want Windows (or Linux), you have several hardware vendors competing for your business. If you want OSX, you have Apple and that means VERY limited choices at highly inflated prices (e.g. no mid-range or low-end towers with expandability at ANY price; they simply do not exist and the Mac Pro is currently MASSIVELY overpriced for the horrible hardware you get; I mean a $2500 computer with a 640GB hard drive (a 1.5TB 7200 Seagate drive costs maybe $100 at most) and 3GB of ram (Apple's ram prices are notorious)? WTF!?!? Increase that to a mere two 1TB drives (so you have a backup) and 6GB of ram and you're pushing $3050!!! That's for a quad-core with a completely outdated graphics card. Want the ATI 4870 card? Add another $200 to the price for $3250 price and the card is STILL horribly outdated. Do you realize what kind of system I could build for a mere $1000-1200 today? It would run circles around the default $2500 Mac Pro in almost all areas. But what choice do you have if you want a Mac with some power and don't want to hack? NONE. You're stuck with Windows or Linux.
I'm sorry, but that's PATHETIC and worse yet it's really bad publicity for the "Mac" market (i.e. no value). And I say it violates the Clayton Antitrust Law "tying" clause. There is no doubt they violated the clause in the "tying" sense. There isn't even an argument to be made there. The law is quite clear that no contracts shall impede competition by forcing the sale of another item. The only question is whether Apple's hardware market share and anti-competition is having a "significant economic effect" or not. Looking at Apple's profit graph linked above compared to the other companies earning a pittance by comparison, I don't see how ANYONE in their right mind could argue that Apple isn't having a "significant economic effect" on that market, especially in light of the case they are looking into (the music sales), which are <30% of the overall music market and so I don't see how having over 30% of the profits of the computer hardware market does NOT qualify as "significant" and therefore a violation of Clayton.
The only difference I see is that Psystar was a tiny business whereas the music industry has huge clout and would sue the pants off anyone at the drop of a pin. Obviously, the justice department responds to that kind of pressure and probably doesn't even know Psystar ever existed (just some back-water judge that threw their countersuit case out without even really looking at it). Only BIG FISH get to play in the U.S. these days. Small businesses and consumers don't matter. They don't have enough cash to bribe Congress and the Justice Department compared to large corporations which have been recently cleared to put out unlimited advertising funds and are considered legally to be people. No wonder Disney thinks that their copyrights will NEVER EVER expire. That's because the corporation cannot "die" and so therefore the clause NEVER EVER takes effect. The Supreme Court have dug the consumers graves on that one. Hey, maybe Microsoft will run for President?
