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Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
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US trustbusters not only go after foreign companies, they also sometimes -- unlike the EU -- send their executives to prison. I like the EU approach better.
The way I read the Sherman Act, in the US, and Article 101, in the EU, is that they both leave a lot of room for interpretation and case law. So unfairness is certainly possible. But it's also possible that's Amazon's tremendous eBook market share is being defended in ways that make it impractical for smart competitors to succeed. If the EU competition authorities can using evolving civil antitrust standards to do something about that, it sounds good to me.
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* According to an estimate in a 2014 report on the e-book market, Amazon has a 79 percent market share in the United Kingdom, with the largest local e-book seller, Waterstone's, at 3.3 percent. Of course, if Britain leaves the EU, this won't be a good example. |
While Amazon does adopt the Walmart approach (i.e. playing extreme hardball with the suppliers), I suspect that the primary barrier to competition is putting together the infrastructure and book contracts together rather than anything that Amazon is doing.
For the most part, I see anti-trust suits as government over reaches. It's pretty hard to maintain a monopoly or cartel for very long barring a government enforcing it. Markets tend to change too fast. Eventually, something will happen to either break Amazon's hold on the ebook market, just like the music market is slowly moving away from buying music to streaming music.