Apple Anti-Trust publishing suit Ping!
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Thoughts?
(reserving further comments for later)
One of the purposes of Anti-Trust Laws is to prevent companies from becoming “Too Big to Fail”.
Or, should you be able to just shut the water off and close for a month?
This is the classic argument.
However, private utilities most often have been granted exclusive franchise and all the obligations that come with that.
Now, a real-life scenario: Gasoline.
Should it be legal for oil companies to collude on the price of a gallon of gas...and raise that to $10/gal overnight...nationwide...and without notice?
I answer: YES!
I am always amazed by those who attempt to defend monopolistic practices, not understanding that a private company with monopolistic power is just as great a threat to individual liberty as a government is. The economic argument for regulating monopolies started with the first exponent of free market economics, Adam Smith, because once you understand market forces and pricing, the economic debility caused by monopolistic power it too easily understood. Those who don't understand it, simply never passed economics 1.
Nothing about anyone's local utility immediately invokes the notion of genius. Rather it is monopoly power enabling voracious incompetence at the expense of everyone who can do nothing about the slow sapping of our economic life by those who have a stranglehold on the lever's of production.
If this is true: “ - - - - The government should not interfere in any pricing or offering, - - - “, then what the HELL is “The Government” doing by coming up with Obama”care.”
________
On Holders bite of the Apple: Obama did invite Steve Jobs’ widow to the 2012 State of the Union speech.
Obama made it clear to her in his speech that he (Obama) would be “going after” US companies who had employees overseas.
BTW, since Obama is a Marxist, I’m sure that invitation/attack on grieving Mrs. Jobs made perfect sense to him - - - . The end justifies the means, or just mean, bad manners.
Does Obama REALLY hate women that much?
Personally, I say “bravo”.
Rhetorical question - of course not.
Antitrust enforcement has devolved into nothing more than a shake-down machine. The nadir was reached under Clinton (who else) with Pitofsky and Klein at the FTC and DoJ routinely extracting a Beltway tax on all major mergers.
Recall that Microsoft were spending less than $1m a year on lobbyists until Larry Ellison paid for an antitrust hit on them.
FTC, DoJ, FCC, EPA, FDA,..., smash them all and start over.
Disagreeing with the author.
Congress has the constitutional authority to grant limited monopolies to innovators in the form of intellectual property rights such as patents and copyright protection. These rights are further secured through treaties for international trade. These legal monopolies reward innovation. Other legal monopolies can exist through protecting competitive innovations as trade secrets and also by just generally being the best.
Large corporations sometimes circumvent laws in this area in order to gain a monopolistic advantage because their leaders think they can get away with it.
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Publius? In what way were five publishing companies out of over 2000 and a retailer with less than 4% of the retail ebook market a monopoly?
Amazon, with 90% of the eBook sales was DICTATING to all the eBook publishers what the wholesale price of eBooks was going to be, and what the retail price would be—regardless of size, graphics (and royalties for said included graphics), word/page count, editing costs, publicity costs, or any other costs associated with the production of that eBook—digital copies of best-sellers would be sold on Amazon for $9.99 regardless of the selling price of their hardback bound and paper bound versions!
Amazon's was the TRUE price fixing monopoly!
Even after the introduction of the Agency model of eBook sales, Amazon has a whopping 60% of the eBook market... yet THEY filed the complaint that resulted in the anti-trust action against Apple and five publishers who participate in Agency pricing, which Amazon benefits from! It is just that Amazon no longer has a 90% monopoly of eBooks... and a whopping profit margin on eBooks, dictated by their overwhelming market force!
A digital product does NOT lend itself well to the wholesale model of sale, like a hard copy of a book. There IS NO INVENTORY to sell... no hard product to ship, store, sell, and send to a retail customer. No product for a jobber or retailer to purchase, stock, shelve, display, and resell to an end user. A digital product is an intangible... and is more suitable to be sold in an Agency model.
There is obviously room in the market for BOTH models... but that did not suit Amazon. They were pissed that their monopoly was broken! So they complained to the FEDS... They want their model back... the one that was breaking the backs of the publishers and the authors and allowing one big player to dictate the price of all best selling eBooks.
More proof of how infantile libertarianism is. I’ll eat my hat if she’s not a libertarian