Quote:
Originally Posted by rcentros
Ironic that Amazon's 65%-80% of the eBook market is a "monopoly," whereas Microsoft's 90-some% of the Desktop OS market is not. 
I think it depends on whose ox is getting gored. |
Well, now...
1- Judge Penfield Jackson did declare them a monopoly and put them on double secret probation for ten years.
2- We're in the Post-PC era, havent you heard? Desktop conputers are passe and don't matter anymore.
3- Back in '95, MS as a company was apolitical and did very little lobbying, which is why Reno was ordered to go after them. They had no politicians "on retainer". Since then they've learned tbeir lesson.
And, as pointed out above, so has everybody else in the tech world. So unless they screw with their employees' job mobility or partner with a bunch of loudmouthed idiots who don't delete incriminating emails they have a lot of latitude.
Now, as to Amazon specifically, the problem the tradpubbers face is that Amazon is only big in consumer trade book publishing. Which is a tiny fraction of publishing in general. Note that when Penguin merged with Random House the two companies controlled a bigger portion of trade book publishing than Amazon does now and the DOJ and FTC signed off on the merger with no conditions because there is a whole lot more to publishing than that little pond by the bigger sea.
Back in the day, the hanging judge had to deprecate servers, clusters, mainframes, minis, workstations, embedded systems, and above all, *mobile* to be able to declare Microsoft an OS monopoly.
The gold-plated anti-Amazon gang is going to have to buy a lot more that the NYT front page to get the government to ignore 90% of the publishing world. Which they may very well be doing.
You never know what evil lurks in the hearts of politicians.