Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham
It was the combination of a coordinated move to the agency model and the MFN that meant this was price fixing.
Graham
|
Exactly.
It was a *conspiracy* conviction.
The very definition of conspiracy says that the crime is in the coordination.
All the pieces of this crime by themselves are legally tolerable, individually, but assembled as they were, with a stated intent to *raise* prices on consumers, makes for an abuse of market power. Guilty, guilty, guilty.
It is not unlike building a pipe bomb: all the pieces can be legally obtained and owned but the moment you assemble it you are guilty, guilty, guilty. You don't even have to actually deploy it to be guilty, whereas Apple and flunkies most definitely deployed their anti-competition bomb. And the bomb did real harm to real people, both consumers and competitors.
This is no witch hunt, it is an attempt to restrain a very big rogue operator without shooting it. If the attempts continue to fail, they msy have to bring out the big guns.