I was claiming you didn't read the bloody article mate. I am not trying to be rude, but if a sworn statement by the people selling books[0], who have the receipts, to the highest court in the land doesn't convince you Amazon itself stated similar numbers on the record.
Amazon head of kindle saying apple is overstating market share, we have at least 70-80 percent, "[apple's] math doesn't add up", in the cnet article Amazon; We have 70-80 percent of the e-book market"[1]
Crediit Suisse also released a famous report with the 90% figure, which was discussed by the wallstreet journal[2]. The daily finance also stated that figure citing interviews as well as the CS report.
I was just having a bit of a laugh at the absurdity of charging them with anti-competitive tactics, when in fact they introduced competition in a welkl agreed upon narrative that is quite literally the definition of a monopoly. It can also be evidenced buy the fact that, they engaged heavily in dumping and while not 100% proveable, the booksellers were aware of their price structure. Knowing that dumping, being charachterized by an outsized market actor selling significant capacity below market value to drive competition out of business, we can retroactively assume with some confidence that booksellers claims of dumping, followed by a steep price reduction and numerous inbdustry actors going out of business could be a decent heuristic to assdume they are correct.
Once again, my point isn't whether Apple was right or wrong, but that it is difficult to assume a rational body would conclude given this information, that Apple had inflicted 450M worth of damage, and also ignore the tight concentration of supply Amazon was allowed to control.
The second point I will now make, which I make here daily now, is that these dynamics are dangerous and we need to be careful about reliance on a single entity as it can be damaging. It is unpredicatable how the laws are enforced, granting a monopoly to one company who uses it to upsell ads and tracking software and fining them under 1/10th of the CEOs annual pay for a 4 year offense, and the implication that a player with 3/4ths of the market control(likely more by their own admission) was allowed to manipulate prices while 2 companies buying and selling goods, negotiated the price they were willing to sell to the market, were served a 450m fine for anti competitive dealings.
I am very concerned about how things are playing out. And I hope others are as well.
edit: further youyr original posit:
>"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
I wanted to point out that while if we assume Smith to be correct here, it is irrelevent. You seem to raise the point that 2 people of the same industry meeting to discuss business is bad for competition. However, Apple a buyer/market maker meeting with suppliers is what one would expect, as that is how markets work. Maybe they were nefarious, but meeting with buyers and negotiating the terms of a new platform and price structure seem fairly in line with what I would expect to find in the economy. If the publishers themselves all met in secret and withheld supply then I don't see how, even if complicit, it would solely fall on apple & if they did in fact do that, Amazon had secured the rights, so Apple would actually be worse off having colluded & agreed to a higher price, while a market leading competitor enjoyed a better rate.
If you're mad about the ebook market concentrating on Amazon, you should be absolutely furious at Apple over agency pricing. That was when ebookstores were launching and competing for attention. Agency pricing blocked a critical dimension of competition when the big wave of new ebookstores was trying to get off the ground.
And even if Apple didn't want to compete with Amazon over price, others did. For instance Google - their Play Books pricing model seems to be "discount whatever we can, wherever we can". Even in these "agency lite" days, they're still a useful price-match reference for the Kindle Store. Or consider Kobo - they had a regular stream of coupons that made them worth checking for a lot of books... until agency pricing clamped down on the books you could apply them to.
Instead, agency pricing more-or-less froze the ebook market starting in 2010 until 2013 or so (when the last publisher defendant settled and started allowing discounting again), entrenching Kindle as the default platform for most readers, crushing smaller companies that wanted to try something different. More over, this has worrying downstream effects - encouraging many independent authors to be Kindle-only and so on.
> If you're mad about the ebook market concentrating on Amazon, you should be absolutely furious at Apple over agency pricing.
Pretty consistently, when I am not fucking about on here and trying to have a good sense of humor about various absurdities that we have all come to accept, I make the same broad points. So no I don't actually care that that amazon has the ebook market, and it wasn't encouraging that if Apple hadn't raised prices Google was waiting right there. My point was that Apple acted quite rationally however the system is unpredictable and rife with power imbalance. Which underscores the point I always make which is that; in this example, Amazon had a massive power imbalance.
However, I also find it dosconcerting that Apple has end to end control over an entire ecosystem, albeit smaller than Amazon and Google.
I Also find it disconcerting that almost exclusive access to internet and telephone communications is owned by 4 companies.
I find it slightly absurd that one company controls almost exclusively the english language interface to the internet, owning operating systems, hardware, isps, DNS, browser, search, most code cdns ect.
Amazon owns most of the underlying hardware developers build on, by some counts they have more servers than google. They own distribution of media both print and AV, as well as distribution of physical goods, which they service themselves and soon they will move deeper into transmission with automated freight movement of goods. Given that most manufacturing will go completely automated soon, Amazon will have the ability to operate the entire value chain almost completely aurtomated.
Apple owns cellphones, router, laptops, music distribution, video distribution, controls a nontrivial sofgtware marketplace and has tons of other vertically and horizontally integrated side services.
> Instead, agency pricing more-or-less froze the ebook market starting in 2010 until 2013.
Agency pricing has caused a systemic underinvestkment in infrastructure at a time when it is more dire than ever. So while "encouraging many independent authors to be Kindle-only and so on" may be a problem, it has likley been solved by the millions of voicing empowered by the internet.
so, i am trying to simply interject that we have maybe one more chance to fix it, and I should try and encvourage people to think at a higher level (not talking down to you as you seem to have more domain expertise) but in this sense it is kind of like a fractal pattern right, this small issue of content distribution and collusion, is actually a very tiny symptom of a very big content distribution and high concentration problem set.
> I was claiming you didn't read the bloody article mate. I am not trying to be rude
Then you should read what people post. Perhaps then you won't sound like a rude person.
I diddn't said anything about the 90% market sahre, I asked about your accusation of price dumping
And until now you have provided 0 proof of it. Amazon was selling some books at a loss but the whole division was profitable. Amazon was investigated by the DOJ and they didn't found anything
So yes, I will ask again, what is your source for the price dumping accusation. And, no, something said by the publishers accused is not proof of anything.
Amazon head of kindle saying apple is overstating market share, we have at least 70-80 percent, "[apple's] math doesn't add up", in the cnet article Amazon; We have 70-80 percent of the e-book market"[1]
Crediit Suisse also released a famous report with the 90% figure, which was discussed by the wallstreet journal[2]. The daily finance also stated that figure citing interviews as well as the CS report.
I was just having a bit of a laugh at the absurdity of charging them with anti-competitive tactics, when in fact they introduced competition in a welkl agreed upon narrative that is quite literally the definition of a monopoly. It can also be evidenced buy the fact that, they engaged heavily in dumping and while not 100% proveable, the booksellers were aware of their price structure. Knowing that dumping, being charachterized by an outsized market actor selling significant capacity below market value to drive competition out of business, we can retroactively assume with some confidence that booksellers claims of dumping, followed by a steep price reduction and numerous inbdustry actors going out of business could be a decent heuristic to assdume they are correct.
Once again, my point isn't whether Apple was right or wrong, but that it is difficult to assume a rational body would conclude given this information, that Apple had inflicted 450M worth of damage, and also ignore the tight concentration of supply Amazon was allowed to control.
The second point I will now make, which I make here daily now, is that these dynamics are dangerous and we need to be careful about reliance on a single entity as it can be damaging. It is unpredicatable how the laws are enforced, granting a monopoly to one company who uses it to upsell ads and tracking software and fining them under 1/10th of the CEOs annual pay for a 4 year offense, and the implication that a player with 3/4ths of the market control(likely more by their own admission) was allowed to manipulate prices while 2 companies buying and selling goods, negotiated the price they were willing to sell to the market, were served a 450m fine for anti competitive dealings.
I am very concerned about how things are playing out. And I hope others are as well.
edit: further youyr original posit:
>"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
I wanted to point out that while if we assume Smith to be correct here, it is irrelevent. You seem to raise the point that 2 people of the same industry meeting to discuss business is bad for competition. However, Apple a buyer/market maker meeting with suppliers is what one would expect, as that is how markets work. Maybe they were nefarious, but meeting with buyers and negotiating the terms of a new platform and price structure seem fairly in line with what I would expect to find in the economy. If the publishers themselves all met in secret and withheld supply then I don't see how, even if complicit, it would solely fall on apple & if they did in fact do that, Amazon had secured the rights, so Apple would actually be worse off having colluded & agreed to a higher price, while a market leading competitor enjoyed a better rate.
[0]http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/No-15-5...
[1]http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-we-have-70-80-percent-of-e-b...
[2]http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2010/02/16/analyst-amazon-e-...
[3]http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/02/17/amazons-e-book-market...