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Comment by dccoolgai | Hacker News Reader

Seems kinda monopolistic... You're not supposed to make "agreements" with your competitors regarding what you will and won't compete on, right? That's what they always said in those corporate training videos, anyway. How was this legal?

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I didn’t see anything in the email that suggested they were agreeing to partition the market. Apple said they didn’t want to compete with Apple w.r.t. Office. Who would? Office is awesome and it’s not Apple’s wheelhouse. ClarisWorks would need massive resources to compete. They were just being transparent that they weren’t in the business of serious Office-suite-like development. The rest of the points seemed like they were quid-pro-quo decisions that could potentially give customers a lot of value: QuickTime support on MS machines, Microsoft developing IE for Apple (and Office)... in this context, Apple is talking to Microsoft as a software package provider, Apple needs partnerships with these companies so their OS can get traction.

"Apple said they didn’t want to compete with Apple w.r.t. "

... That's what market partitioning _is_ though, right?

The two parties could independently come to the conclusion that Apple shouldn't compete with Office, but actually discussing it (and documenting the discussion!) is a flagrant violation of U.S. anti-trust laws.

Apple probably also did not want to compete with Michelin w.r.t tires either.

Partitioning the market is when you, well, partition the MARKET, meaning divide up potential BUYERS of your product with some other company selling a similar product, so that your company is effectively a monopoly within the subset of buyers that you were allocated.

So the buyers for office software may have had two options, but after this deal there was effectively a monopoly with both potential subsets of buyers left with only MS Office as a choice... This reads like the definition of a monopoly from a school textbook...

From the US Department of Justice Federal Trade Commission, An Antitrust Primer:

'Market division or allocation schemes are agreements in which competitors divide markets among themselves. In such schemes, competing firms allocate specific customers or types of customers, products, or territories among themselves.'

'This primer briefly describes the most common antitrust violations and outlines those conditions and events that indicate anticompetitive collusion.'

When I was querying Windstream and AT&T for internet service, one refused to build new service, even if we paid for the construction cost, because the other was already in the area.

The question is are they doing it because it’s not cost effective and they don’t have the infrastructure to compete, or because of an internal agreement not to intrude on each others turf?

> The question is are they doing it because it’s not cost effective and they don’t have the infrastructure to compete

If it's cost prohibitive then the solution is common carrier status to become like electrical distribution network.

If it's not cost prohibitive that then the solution is criminal prosecution. It doesn't matter whether or not there's a formal internal agreement; there's clearly intent and informal collusion.

Unfortunately I don't have the answer here. And it was 9 years ago so well beyond meaning other than an anecdote.

Everyone knows that daily reality isn't in sync with corporate training videos, regardless of the company.

They are only used for public image and putting the legal department on the safe side when things go wrong.

But there's like "doesn't follow their mottos like 'don't be evil'" and then there's "flagrant violations of federal law". No matter how disingenuous the company is, there's got to be some consequences for the latter... Or you would at least expect them to try and be circumspect about it... This just says on paper "we agreed not to compete".

Agreed, yet if most companies business practices were actually investigated properly, in every single location across the globe where they operate, it is quite clear certain locations would have already closed doors if the videos were followed to the letter.

Or in the spirit. This isn't splitting hairs: they flaunted the law and got away with it.

Would that be a bad thing? Or would that mean we'd have healthier competition?

Surely, as it would mean less corruption actually.

I got the same feel, but there were collaborating on somethings so those discussions were legit. But yeah, the minutes don’t read like two competing companies trying to steal each other business.

The fact that they were also collaborating legitimately in some parts of the deal doesn't justify the fact that they were also colluding blatantly in other parts of the deal.

But who is gonna fine Google or Microsoft? The US certainly benefits from these huge corporations, so there isn’t much incentive to hinder them with legislation and fines.

The problem is politicians have realised that these corporations, particularly the ones with significant social media presence, have enormous influence on political discourse, and thus the fate of politicians themselves. There is no way they are going to leave that to chance, or what to them probably seem like arbitrary platform policies and algorithms.

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