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Originally Posted by MikeFromHC
Lucky for us the situation is not as simple as that. The right of a company to sell or not sell what they want went out a long time ago when the government found out the actual ingredients of many of these products.
Most of th entertainment world is also governed by rules.
Amazon's position on the internet and the money they can toss around might cause them to be considered a monopoly and arbitrary refusals could be considered a restraint of trade.
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Simply being a monopoly isn't against the law, but it does put you in a position to break laws that are much more difficult for smaller companies to break.
The oft-cited Microsoft example: Microsoft didn't run into legal trouble because they were shipping IE with Windows (at least, not in the US - the EU went way overboard IMO), they ran into legal trouble because they were coercing hardware retailers into not shipping PC's with Netscape pre-installed by threatening to revoke their contracts with MS. Because MS had sole control over who was able to purchase Windows, and because Windows was far and away the most popular OS on the market (95%+ at that time, I believe), not being able to ship Windows was a death sentence for hardware retailers. This abuse of their monopoly position to unfairly eliminate competition is illegal.
I don't see how Amazon's censorship is going to affect any of their competitors in any way (in some ways it's actually a boon to competitors, since they can say "we have it, Amazon doesn't"), so I don't see how it can run afoul of anti-trust laws. They aren't coercing anybody else into not selling these books, they are simply not selling them themselves. That's well within their rights.
For an example of what Amazon could do that would be illegal, if Amazon threatened to not carry any of a given publisher's books if they did not stop publishing certain books they found objectionable, that would run afoul of anti-trust laws. Amazon is in a position to at the very least severely damage that publisher, and they are abusing that position prevent the sale of certain books, which would be in direct competition with Amazon's books (who is also a publisher and retailer).
That would be an illegal abuse of a monopoly, and in fact that would even get a company that was not a monopoly into big legal trouble. The monopoly simply makes the potential damage much greater, and as a result the potential fines much greater.
Look at Microsoft IE and how their share has been eroded by Seamonkey/Firefox and Chrome and Opera. And the portable computers we call "phones" which run non-MS software. Their 90% monopoly is crumbling even as we speak. This is Amazons future, Google says hello.