A law professor’s new book frames the 2012 antitrust suit as an open-and-shut case unlawful pricing conspiracy. The former publisher of the Wall Street Journal disagrees.
From L. Gordon Crovitz’ review of “‘United States v. Apple’ Review: In Competition We Trust” by Chris Sagers in Monday’s Wall Street Journal ($):
When Steve Jobs decided to include e-books on the iPad in 2010, Kindle had a 90% market share. So book publishers were again delighted—that Apple would be entering the market with its revenue-share model and letting publishers set the prices for their e-books. The largest publishers met among themselves to agree on the terms for licensing their books to Apple. The government sued, claiming an unlawful conspiracy masterminded by Apple.
Mr. Sagers sees this as an open-and-shut case of an unlawful pricing conspiracy and expresses surprise that there was so much support for the book publishers and Apple…
Mr. Sagers believes that opposition to the Apple case shows that Americans are ambivalent about competition. There are times, he says, when “competition seems destructive.” When antitrust law requires firms to compete in such circumstances, then “antitrust itself has seemed like a failure.” The government claimed that Apple conspired with book publishers, risking higher prices, but the case was perceived as a government favor to Amazon, which it was.
My take: Bad cases make bad law.
See also: The view from the hard benches.
Agree, bad cases make bad law.
A 90% share retailers dictates price. Is that competitive? Isn’t that monopolistic?
Book retailers have always set price. That’s how Barnes and Noble put so many independents out of business and expected to do the same with Amazon. As for 90% share of kindle ebooks, you weren’t composing when Apple music had that kind of monopoly.
@ S (Sam? Susan? Thought we were supposed to be open and above board here vis-a-vis names….)
“…you weren’t composing when Apple music had that kind of monopoly.”
I’m guessing you meant complaining.
Amazon has gotten away with a ton of predatory pricing, and wiped out a lot of businesses in the process. It’s also built it’s Cloud empire on dirty but cheap energy.
Not exactly a lily-white corporation.
Yes, I meant complaining, Thank you.
” Amazon has gotten away with a ton of predatory pricing, and wiped out a lot of businesses in the process. ” In case you hadn’t noticed, since Barnes and Noble has been struggling independent bookstores are making a comeback. As for clean energy, Amazon isn’t at 100% but then it has built more wind and solar farms than Apple and the last I checked Apple was still a customer of AWS.
“last I checked Apple was still a customer of AWS.”
Do you know how big a customer? I thought Apple was building out its own cloud resources…
There were a bunch of stories on April 22 this year when I queried Apple AWS news
Here’s one
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/22/18511148/apple-icloud-cloud-services-amazon-aws-30-million-per-month
Thanks. $30 million a month ain’t peanuts.
I had an argument online some years back about who was number one in cloud services. He just couldn’t believe that not only was Apple not number one, they weren’t even in the top ten. Several years later, Google and Microsoft are now earning billions as well and Apple is still buying to supply its needs.
@ PED:
Actually, it pretty much is peanuts.
Apple revenue is ~$260 B/year. $360 M/year is 1/722 of Apple’s total revenue.