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Originally Posted by fjtorres
But Amazon isn't either.
The US publishing world is much much bigger than ebooks, and much bigger tgan trade publishing.
Amazon's total share of the total publishing market distribution channel is barely 15-20%. ($4-5B vs $27B).
That is hardly near-monopoly numbers.
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That's completely irrelevant to whether Amazon is a monopoly or near-monopoly in eBook publishing. Electronic books do not compete against blogs except in the eyes of social scientists speculating about why people are reading fewer books.
From a legal perspective, monopolies are defined within a single industry or industry segment in which the products are fungible, not across broad, unrelated markets. In this case, we're talking about the eBook market, of which Amazon has about a 75% share.
So yes, that
is a near monopoly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
And when it comes to free speech, the arenas where Amazon doesn't play (Textbooks, journals, newspapers, online...) are all more important to free speech than how many adult coloring books Amazon ships out to stressed-out customers.
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That's certainly a valid point, with caveats. Those other channels are much harder to monetize, to such an extent that they're dying off. By contrast, eBook sales are a growing market. So when you take a long enough view, most of the arenas in which Amazon doesn't play probably won't even exist, whereas the arenas in which Amazon does play probably will.
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Originally Posted by fjtorres
Back when Penguin and Random House announced they were shacking up there was some squeaking from agents about how the merger would harm "free speech" by reducing the number of deep pocket bidders for titles. The feds laughed and rubber-stamped the deal because even though, combined, the randy penguin started out with nearly half of the trade publishing sector,
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No, in fact, combined, they make up only about a quarter of the English language book business—nowhere near half. Contrast that with Amazon's 75% of the eBook market. It really isn't comparable.
Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
the *relevant market* for antitrust purposes is the entirety of US publishing, not the narrow segment that relies on retailers and airport newstands.
And the number of publishers active is way too big for any single publisher (or distributor) *acting alone* to harm consumer interests. (Conspiracies are a different matter.)
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No, the entirety of U.S. publishing is most certainly
not a market for antitrust purposes. It is hundreds of unrelated markets that don't compete against one another at all from a consumer perspective.
Antitrust law requires consideration of cross-elasticity of demand. If you look at
Golden Gate v. Pfizer, the courts actually said that prescription drugs was a bogus market because it was too broad, because people who buy drugs for one illness are not likely to substitute drugs for a different, unrelated illness because of changes in their relative prices. So antitrust suits would need to be about much narrow markets, e.g. Alzheimer's drugs.
By that standard, the eBook market is likely to be
too broad for the courts, not too narrow. A science fiction eBook is not necessarily interchangeable for a romance novel, and it is certainly not interchangeable for a textbook. So the courts would likely consider textbooks to be a separate market from fiction books at the very least, and certainly not in the same market as (for example) newspapers, magazines, blogs, or telephone books.
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Originally Posted by fjtorres
People in publishing have this quaint idea that Amazon has some sort of obligation to carry their products, at Amazon expense, under *their* terms as if they were some public utility or a broadcaster utilizing public airwaves. They need to disabuse themselves of that silliness.
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Ah, but when you have 75% of the market, and when Amazon is the primary mechanism through which users discover content, they are in a position of great power, and with that power comes great responsibility. They don't have an obligation from a legal perspective, but as long as they're in a near-monopoly position, they do have a
moral obligation to allow the sale of anything that doesn't violate any laws.
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Originally Posted by fjtorres
One. More. Time: censorship is about government institutions.
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No, it isn't. The first amendment right to free speech is about government institutions exclusively. However, the concept of censorship is in no way exclusively about government censorship. Censorship by corporations might not be a violation of people's constitutional rights, but it is still censorship.