[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

No, I didn't. In several posts, I pointed out that Apple did not take the law into their own hands, i.e. engage in a per se violation. The issue isn't that Amazon had an illegal monopoly (which I am not claiming by the way. One can have a monopoly and not be illegal). The true issue is did Apple's (and the 5 publishers) help competition or harm it. It seems fairly straight forward to me that introducing a new ebook store with strong backing increases competition and the health of the market in a situation where one ebook store (Amazon) has 90 percent of the market.

I know that few here wish to read Bork's Anittrust Paradox, but here is a link that gives a fair summary of Bork's argument. The author of the article is an anti-trust lawyer.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/ar...robert-h-bork/

Very elucidative.

[...] It was this kind of output restriction, Sherman realized, which brought about unnecessarily high prices for consumers, and it is this which the Sherman Act was framed to prohibit. [...]

[...] If the competition is promoting efficiency—that is, working well for the population as a whole—it may indeed destroy rivals who are relatively inefficient. By systematically slighting this elementary point, antitrust judges and prosecutors have often produced the opposite of what antitrust policy was meant to do. By protecting the inefficient competitor, they have done harm to competition. [...]

[...] to deal with competition as a process whose imperatives—whose rights and wrongs—are essentially different from the imperatives suggested simply by the suffering of a small businessman or the prosperity of a large corporation. [...]

(Bold is mine.)