Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
You and the Feds both. They've made that pretty clear and Amazon is painfully aware of it.
People keep forgetting that it is *not* illegal to acquire a dominant market position or even an outright monopoly. (And again: market share is usually a poor metric of market domination.) What *is* illegal is to abuse dominant market power to the detriment of *consumers*.
Suppliers and competitors are *not* directly protected by US antitrust law, but rather only indirectly, to the extent that their continued participation benefits consumers.
And since antitrust law is *reactive* not proactive, Amazon is legally above reproach until they actually do harm to consumers. Which is why all the anti-Amazon whining achieves nothing.
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Exactly. As a supplier, if they decide to say, "Only those in our exclusive program get 70 percent" or "We've just decided to lower commissions for everyone..." Once they have even 60 percent of the ebook market, your book has to be there to garner any kind of sales. They are a huge machine with eyeballs there every day. Even now, a lot of authors report that 80 to 100 percent of sales come from Amazon. THAT'S scary to me as a supplier even without all the rest of the stuff going on.
It's the same sort of thing Amazon is already doing with small publishers--changing contracts to pay a lower percentage of list price.
(In case people haven't seen these articles:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...yndication=rss)
Who knows how long before contracts for direct upload suddenly change?