Quote:
Originally Posted by lumpynose
I suppose they could break up Amazon since it is becoming a monopoly. Like they did when they broke up Bell Telephone. For those who aren't old enough to remember those days, Bell Telephone provided the phones for the entire US, except for tiny pockets here and there.
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Of course, the issue was that while Bell Telephone had the monopoly, you could only hook Bell Telephone equipment up and you were required to use Bell Telephone. It was truly a government enforced monopoly. As such, it was under no pressure to innovate. So things like voice mail, touch tone and mobile phones were all sitting in the labs rather than being made available to the general public. Long distance was by the minute and very expensive.
The big difference is Amazon is not a government mandated monopoly. Therefore anyone can compete with them. Where Amazon might get in trouble is using profits from one area to support selling items below cost in order to drive out competitors in one area of business, i.e. the Standard Oil behavior. However, with agency pricing, that's not possible.
My take is that there is nothing to prevent a deep pocket company from building the infrastructure to compete with Amazon, either on ebooks, or any other line of online retail.