Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
It is very unlikely though not impossible.
It has happened once, that an antitrust judge allowed a trial by accepting a biased and carefully sculpted definition of "relevant market" designed to exclude most competitors. Despite this, the judge was forced to issue a judgment of no harm done and had to settle for branding the target as a "monopolist". It cost them respectable money but they survived, outlived the instigators, and are currently prospering. Unlike the judge's reputation. Abusing the legal system quietly ended his career. No citations, no significant cases.
It might happen again but as I said it is unlikely.
A more relevant case was the merger of Random House and Penguin who at the time controlled the copyright of half the BPH books, not just retailed them. The feds shrugged, said the publishing world is much bigger than trade books, and rubberstamped the deal.
Moral: the relevant market for antitrust in publishing is *all* the books sold in the US, $27B, not the $14 billion sold to consumers through trade books,of which Amazon moves about half. That's maybe $7B of the $27B market, or about 26%. Nowhere near a monopoly even in publishing alone.
Not even a hanging judge can pretrend there's a case there.
Besides, the real issue isn't that Amazon is too strong but that everybody else is too weak.
Maybe Daunt can do something about that.
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Dream on. Anti-trust is as much political as it is legal, i.e. who the feds choose to file charges again. Bezos might just find that dabbling so much in politics has a cost. Is there a legit case on anti-trust with Amazon? Of course. You can spin the numbers however you like to try to favor your beloved Amazon, but they do control significant portions of the book market and Amazon's preference of playing hardball can come back to haunt them.
It does very much depend on the judge. Some judges favor the Bork view of anti-trust, i.e. who is harmed. This view holds that for it to be anti-trust, the consumer has to be harmed, not just competitors. The more traditional view is that certain practices are per se violations regardless of who is harmed or not.