It's hard to make a good argument that amazon is (or could be) a monopoly. It's more like google or Walmart where they're just really big and their scale makes them hard (not impossible, maybe unrewarding) to compete with.
This was part of why Chrome quickly rose after that. The other part was that Google became anticompetitive.
(The Netscape source code -- released in part because Netscape was dying --if I recall ended up forming the basis of Firefox, so it's fair to speculate "what ifs" if the Microsoft anti-trust judgement was more swift.)
> BrowserChoice.eu was a website created in March 2010 as the result of the decision in the European Union Microsoft competition case. The case involved legal proceedings by the EU against Microsoft and found that, by including Internet Explorer (IE) with their market-dominant Windows operating system, Microsoft had used their dominance of the operating system market to also create a dominant market position in the web browser market.
I’m confused, what are you trying to say? Chrome didn’t exist until 2017?
I've never known whether European antitrust (or privacy) action against companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook has had significant global/US effect. Do you (or anyone else) know of a good source on this?
Regarding effects of BrowserChoice, Opera had some statistics: https://web.archive.org/web/20111209114445/http://my.opera.c...
Mozilla also reports how much they lost due to BrowserChoice not running for a while – BrowserChoice had almost doubled their overall download rate: http://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-lost-6-9-million-downlo...
I heard through the grapevine that in the marketplace agreement, that you must list all products from all channels you have a presence in with the amazon channel to stay in compliance.
why would they do that? Oh probably because Ma Bell uses that data to target which products they want to compete in from their eCommerce company.
Isn't "burning money until you kill competition" inherently illegal?
I assume Uber has the same issue.
The act is not meant to punish businesses that come to dominate their market passively or on their own merit, only those that intentionally dominate the market through misconduct, which generally consists of conspiratorial conduct of the kind forbidden by Section 1 of the Sherman Act, or Section 3 of the Clayton Act.
The FTC also has more information: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
> The Sherman Act outlaws [...] any "monopolization, attempted monopolization, or conspiracy or combination to monopolize."
If you look at any felony e.g. selling hard drugs there are always mitigating circumstances and exceptions - but they don't invalidate the general rule. The text of section 2 is pretty clear that monopolies are generally illegal.
From the DOJ: Monopolization requires (1) monopoly power and (2) the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident.
https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...
- monopolies are illegal since 1890
- excepting natural monopolies (utilities), which are strictly regulated instead
- since the 1980s, also excepting companies that keep prices low for the end consumer. This is the space where Walmart, Amazon and Uber have grown. But, if they try to raise prices substantially OR if enforcement guidelines become more strict again (b/c politics), these giant companies can get into giant legal trouble (see: break-up of AT&T).
Are we in disagreement an any of these points? If you think unregulated monopolies were OK before 1985, can you give any examples? Same for post-1985 unregulated monopolies that raised consumer prices?
If it were illegal to be a monopoly, no firm could ever invent a new product category as they would be a monopoly in that market. There's a hundred years of case law supporting the fact the being a monopoly is not illegal. The US v. Grinnell is one of the big ones, and quoted in the DOJ page I linked to.
https://www.quora.com/When-and-why-were-monopolies-outlawed-...
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-oligopolies-legal-if-monopolie...
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
https://www.wired.com/2012/10/antitrust-is-supposed-to-prote...
http://www.girardgibbs.com/antitrust-monopoly/
As another example, Microsoft was found to be a monopoly and to be monopolizing. The result of the case was not that they had to stop being a monopoly, it was that they had to stop the unfair and monopolizing business practices.
Next up: the 18th amendment did not implement Prohibition, since it still allowed alcohol consumption; it merely forbade obtaining it.
The links present a unilateral view of the issue, mainly from lawyers defending big companies. Here's the other side from our longest serving Justice, William O. Douglas [1]:
"We have here the problem of bigness. Its lesson should by now have been burned into our memory by Brandeis. The Curse of Bigness shows how size can become a menace - both industrial and social. It can be an industrial menace because it creates gross inequalities against existing or putative competitors. It can be a social menace - because of its control of prices. [...] That power can be utilized with lightning speed. It can be benign or it can be dangerous. The philosophy of the Sherman Act is that it should not exist. For all power tends to develop into a government in itself. Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy. Industrial power should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men. The fact that they are not vicious men but respectable and social minded is irrelevant. That is the philosophy and the command of the Sherman Act. It is founded on a theory of hostility to the concentration in private hands of power so great that only a government of the people should have it."
[1] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/334/495.html
Not true. At all. We have a weak Anti-Trust law that most Justice departments are squeamish about enforcing.
An unenforced strong law can become enforced essentially overnight and wipe out those violating it.
Like, MS got hit for leveraging their 'OS market' monopoly to break into the 'browser market', even though they are both pieces of software.
If you draw distinct markets aggressively enough, then everything is its own market and many companies are monopolists in their own narrow niche.
Also, what if technological changes turn two originally separate markets into a unified entity -- should it be anticompetitive if a monopolist does that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevant_market#Definition_and...
The problem with these definitions as applied to the tech industry in particular is that oftentimes the 'price' the consumer pays is non-monetary.
For example, should Google's dominance in the search industry preclude it from cross-promoting its other services?
If both search and also the product it's cross-promoting are free, how should courts go about figuring out whether that's ok?
Presumably Google is getting paid in data, and is turning that data into money via Ads, but the actual accounting of how much that data is worth is only something that Google has access to -- and then to see how this works for competitors, the court would also need the proprietary internal numbers for them too.