Quote:
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.
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Apple and the price fix 5 did indeed hurt competition. Because of their Agency ways, they drove out a number of eBook stores. They drove out Fictionwise, BooksOnBoard, and Diesel eBooks just to name three. Fictionwise and BooksOnBoard had business models that were not able to be sustained under agency rules and because of that, they were unable to keep the businesses going. Fictionwise and BooksOnBoard were good stores to do business with. In fact, with Fictionwise, I was able to save a lot of money on eBooks. BooksOnBoard a close second sometimes. Fictionwise was even competitive with Amazon. So yes, The Apple Gang did indeed drive others out of business and no, they did not make things more competitive. In fact, all they did was drive away the little guys who had their own ways of doing business that would no longer work under agency.