FTC restores rigorous enforcement of law banning unfair methods of competition
ftc.gov
ftc.gov
There is also an interesting bit of back-and-forth between the dissent and one of the supporting statements: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Section5PolicyS...
I'm still inclined to think it's a good thing. I'm not educated enough on this topic to agree or disagree with any of the commissioners' opinions, but the FTC is clearly interested in sending a signal to the public.
I'm moderately optimistic, although it will be interesting to see what happens after the next presidential election. It's possible that the commissioners are concerned about it, and are trying to make some kind of mark and set precedent before they're all fired and replaced if a Republican (Trump?) takes office in 2024.
The FTC, FCC, and SEC are toothless against billionaires. Just like the IRS, they mainly focus on harassing small-time crooks these days because that's the easiest thing to do. The large scale fraudsters operate with absolute impunity. If anything these organizations actually act as a barrier to entry for people looking to get into fraud, because if you don't get big enough fast enough they will come after you. But once you hit a billion in revenue, you are golden.
In the US you can run a pyramid scheme as long as you have enough money and political influence to do it “legally”.
For example, pay me $20 to join my company and you get the right to recruit people for $20!
Amway is essentially exactly the same except they add a product to the mix to get around the law. They still primarily profit from the "employees" rather than customers.
Changing the definition of a pyramid scheme, for the proposes of law enforcement, to something more akin to "profits primarily off employees" is what needs to be done.
There are 0.0% of pyramid schemes with no product.
You pay some amount of money that gets you basically nothing (maybe a few pages of "how to recruit") and that's it.
MLM schemes are distinct in that they actually have a product and that's what makes them legal.
Literally the last word of the sentence before the sentence you quoted stated the very specific company name.
While I agree that Amway and other pyramid schemes (including most crypto) should be shut down, it's not because they're anti-competitive. They're fraudulent, which is arguably worse but certainly different.
I don's see it as any more fraudulent then tech companies offering products for free or significantly discounted using investor cash to buy massive market share then once they have a monopoly jacking up prices or loading up search results with ads to the point you need to scroll down to even see search results.
Imagine if when google was first released it was nothing but ads and/or websites with more ads from its ad network
But somehow it's just not enough for the FTC to really do anything other than settle and let them continue operate.
Franchise agreements can similarly look really sketchy on the surface especially with a large buy-in, but it’s hard to argue a Mcdonald's franchise agreement is a scam due to the real profits and costs involved. Which isn’t to say every franchise agreement is a good investment.
Where things break down for MLM is really the specific business model and percentages involved. If say 4% of a sales guy’s check gets sent to the chain of people who recruited him then no big deal. However, large percentages or large buy can quickly become very problematic.
One notable exception are car dealers. They somehow secured themselves durable lucrative carve-outs before the VAR thing matured.
The point was buy in can absolutely be used as part of a scam see many 90’s MLM “companies”, but it may also be part of a perfectly reasonable business model.
Even the scammy MLMs these days come with buyback clauses due to FTC agreements so the MLM meme of someone getting stuck with a garage full of product they can’t sell is largely a leftover from the 90s.
Amway's not the best example, since they actually sell real goods and because Amway's sellers' best customers have almost always been the sellers themselves. In other words, many sellers used it as a way to buy goods at "wholesale" and never really had any intention of reselling them. At one point, I think that was even part of the Amway pitch, particularly at the time they were inexplicably popular for their (expensive and therefore in theory a better deal discounted) water treatment products.
I don't think there's a price advantage there compared to Costco or online, though--much of what made Amway fade into the background starting in the mid 90s.
So too Stella Dot, Mary Kay, Cutco/Vector, probably Herbalife and even Transamerica, etc. They sell real stuff, whether or not the pricing makes sense, and you can technically turn a profit on it, whether or not the market is really there, so they're not technically considered a pyramid scheme in the scam/illegal sense.
Now, I'm not saying they're good ideas--at all--and they absolutely operate on hype and pipe dream every bit as much as those awful timeshare presentations. They have the same exponential market saturation issue as any pyramid scheme and the same diminishing returns--but they are generally not considered fraudulent, just obnoxious.
The really awful pyramid schemes mostly just sell "new seller kits" to prospective targets that teach them how to sell "new seller kits" to their targets, have no real product or way to make a profit, and the entire rollup is those kits and other overhead fees. They're the financial equivalent of a chain letter.
I'm pretty sure those do get action taken against them if they're identified. The biggest problem there is most are pretty small, take a bunch of people's money, then burn out once it's all rolled to the top ranks who founded the scheme and new marks aren't easy to find.
Other countries rightfully have seen it this way for some for the companies under discussion.
I probably made the mistake of speaking a little too specifically for the US situation, though. Here, the criteria are (modulo nuance) roughly what I said for the FTC to care.
At some point you have to give up.
I had an aunt for whom this would have been (and was) the case, but she was 1 in 50K level of mentally incapable.
It's a great example because there is just so much about it. It's not some obscure company that has never been sued or never been found guilty. It's a company run by people who commit fraud and get away with it because they are just so wealthy.
It is a criminal organization. They have even pled guilty to criminal charges in the past. But somehow they just get to pay a fine and keep on going.
The whole point of my comment wasn't to focus on Amway but just to point out how ineffective the FTC is. Even when the activity is criminal and/or flagrant they are powerless to actually do anything to stop it. At best you get some modified legal jargon.
They don't break (current) US laws in terms of being a pyramid--not going to get into their history of fraud, racketeering, etc, which isn't an FTC concern.
Anyway, I know you're basically making a "this cause is more important than that cause " argument, but of course a stricter stance specifically re: being anti-competitive wouldn't touch them at all. They don't lead a market in anything anymore.
What I realistically would expect this to bring down, if anything, is the walled gardens, where they exist on devices that have become so central to our lives that this amounts to broadly restricting what goods or services you're able to consume. The wording of what they released seems very specifically crafted to highlight walled gardens and similar concepts, at least where there's arbitrary action in the name of rent taking happening as well.
I suspect this--along with the anti-competitive payment system decision from the Epic case--is the shot across the bow for Apple and Google to either loosen up on iOS and Android (and very specifically, App Store and Play Store) or be targeted.
That'd be good enough for me, for now. I don't like MLMs either, and this may be a first world problem, but it's a daily one I face.
The whole walled garden thing is mostly trivial nonsense. At worst Apple and Google will pay a small fine and a few thousand people will be able to more easily sideload some stuff. Maybe. Probably not though. If it gets to this these companies will simply modify the law so that it doesn't apply to them.
Unfair competition is an American virtue these days. Fair competition is seen as "being weak".
Even this policy statement wasn't approved 4-0. It was 3-1. You've got government bodies that are so politically divided that you literally can't even get FOUR people—WHO RUN THE FTC—to agree that on a simply policy statement that basically says, "Unfair Methods of Competition bad." The dissenting commissioner wrote a 20 page book why she doesn't support this.
And you know what? I mostly agree with the dissenting commissioner. Not wholly because of her views, but because in practice this will be used to harass small(er) business. It will have no material impact on Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple.
But IANAL, so I'd need an ELI5.
Either way, I support overreaching rulesets against gig economy biz models with onerous penalties. eg Repeated radical cashectomies.
Scams like Uber, where Labor has to supply their own Capital to participate, receive no benefits, have no collective bargaining, get shunted into arbitration, and are excluded from profit sharing.
That's just wrong.
Yeah, my parents bought some amway stuff regularly, because in the 90s outside of the US it was actually a good deal on cleaning products. The closest wholesale mall equivalent for us was ~3h drive away.
Whether or not they sell real stuff is a distraction from the real question. To figure out if it is a scam, you need to look at 1) where profits come from (is it from "selling" the product, or is it from recruiting sellers and "selling startup kits".) If most of their money is from people buying "be your own boss and own a business kits" then that is the product. 2) The next question is if that product they are selling (the kit) is a scam or misrepresented pipe dream.
Even if they sell a product, you need to ask if the product is the product. If all the money is from a pyramid of recruiting people to recruit people to buy startup kits, there should be some kind of action taken against them. The distinction becomes more obvious when you look at something like Cutco/Vector, where there is a product company and a marketing kit company.
In essence you can have two identical companies with two identical business models, and one can be a scam and one can not be a scam based on execution. If the business derives profit primary from sales to end customers, then everything is above water. If millions of "own your own businesses" end up with garages full of unsellable product, its a scam.
I recognize this interpretation takes away the agency and culpability from the person who joins a scheme, buys a bunch of stuff in hopefulness, and fails to execute as a salesperson. I also recognize that markets can dry up, and what was once above water can start to look like a scam. But these companies prey on those types of people. And if preying on vulnerable people is your business, its a scam.
Now whenever they hear someone say "literally", they double check with me: "Daddy, is (xyz) a figure of speech?"
I find the behavior both cute and precocious.
Sure, if the signal was “we just want to get beaten up by the courts for trying to turn a regulatory agency into a lawless dictatorship”.
> The FTC, FCC, and SEC are toothless against billionaires
None of them are in primarily aimed, legally, at indivduals, regardless of wealth.
> Just like the IRS, they mainly focus on harassing small-time crooks these days because that's the easiest thing to do.
I don’t think a review of the actual enforcement record of any of those agencies supports that claim. Vonage, Harley-Davidson, Weber grills, Westinghouse outdoor power equipment, OpenDoor Labs—just to cite FTC enforcement actions in the last couple weeks—aren’t small actors.
One of the core jobs of the president is deciding which lawbreakers to go after. This is needed because (among other reasons) the government is far too small to enforce every law. In general the President is supposed to set general parameters but not pick specific individuals or companies. Deciding a specific sector's violations are more pressing is squarely within the traditional discretion of the executive branch.
The other thing to remember is that healthcare costs, while significant, are both familiar and legal, and the government uses the regulatory powers which Congress has granted it. Finance similarly has existing agencies and laws and while there are periods of lax regulation which end badly most people would say that the problem is regulators choosing not to use their powers or Congress underfunding staffing rather than an unclear question of how to handle a particular problem. In contrast, something like what should be acceptable on social media doesn't have public consensus and runs into thorny constitutional issues. It's understandable that this gets more attention, especially a time when one of the major political parties is making unfounded allegations in an attempt to keep their voters active.
If not, then why not look at the merits of the case?
Surely that depends where you live. Seattle (where I live)? Yeah, that would be obvious discrimination. A few counties further inland? Probably not statistically significant.
I’m not sure how or if that reasoning applies to FTC purview, but my intuition is that corporations of the size that might warrant interest aren’t likely to be partisan targets in any stable or persistent way.
That trend doesn't exist now, and you can't use it as a shield against the law and commit crimes as you please.
Most of these big companies are anticompetitive at the very least. Every acquisition over the past decade has been a move towards oligopoly. Add to that widespread union-busting behavior, manipulation of the American people by spreading political or foreign psyops, exerting control over self-contained markets, etc... there's a lot of behavior that's been allowed over the past few decades that should have been reigned in.
That's a very bold claim, and one that I think is generally untrue and possibly extremely so. That might be true for a wealthy software engineer, but I don't think it's true for most people. For example, anyone who doesn't own a Tesla has benefited exactly 0 from the company's existence. If you don't order from Amazon or aren't doing lots of Google searches... same. And in fact, some of these companies - like Amazon, Meta - take far more than they give back. Amazon has killed local stores nationwide, on demand delivery and packaging is awful for the environment, etc. Meta just consumes attention and spreads misinformation.
> They aren't the primary drivers of any of our society's largest problems.
Except in some cases they quite obviously are. Amazon is the case study for abusive workplaces. It's the poster child for foreign-produced, cheap knockoffs. Meta is credited for spreading misinformation that has resulted in the near-destruction of our democracy. Apple, Microsoft, and many others have been implicated for using slave labor in their supply chains. How many products sold on Amazon are products of such labor?
--
I think it's important that we examine these issues critically. These are not benevolent super-corporations. Sometimes they do good, sometimes they do evil, and either way it's generally on a huge scale due to the scale of the companies.
I don't think that's obvious at all. Give specifics.
They put a absolutely massive amount of resources on solving delivery. And they probably do it better than anyone. You couldn’t split that out without totally breaking it.
You don't get to deny vertical integration just due to them being involved in everything.
It’s not the vertical integration that matters but the amount of market power a company has. My pizza place: almost none. Amazon: significantly more than none.
For example, the President could fire the Secretary of Labor at any time, for any purpose, because executive department heads serve "at the pleasure of the President." The same is not true for FTC commissioners, who are statutorily protected from firing except for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." SCOTUS held in Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935) that an FTC commissioner could not be removed by the President for policy reasons, because it was explicitly granted non-executive powers by Congress.
His power to issue Executive Orders to independent agencies is unclear, and often Presidents will "recommend" they do things, rather than "direct" them, as he would an executive department.
> The FTC is an independent federal agency, and the President doesn't have the same amount of control over it that he has over federal executive departments.
Isn't that the same as the FCC? We all know what happened with it and Net Neutrality during the Trump administration.
If it's staffed/led by the right people, it could act as a semi-autonomous political weapon.
Trying to turn the internet into tiered internet packages like early 2000s cable companies offered would be a disaster even without neutrality laws. There's probably a reason the only real-life example in history that Wikipedia lists was some bottom-of-the-barrel Portuguese mobile network that experimented with a discount plan that never took off.
The lobbyists either bought into the bullshit benefits like everyone else or more likely were just taking the default anti-gov interference position.
The internet is so far from ever being the extremely limited centralized platforms that cable offerings were that the analogies never made sense if you spent any amount of time considering them.
But finding an uncorruptible, unopinionated, independently-minded civil servant... who also values service over salary... is a pretty tough ask. ;)
Civil servants necessarily put their own personal politics aside, because in all likelihood they will serve under several different political administrations. That is not the case, nor the expectation, for political appointees.
I should have clarified that my next sentence was switching to refer to the people who implement policies set by the senior levels: there are many people who do not agree with all of those decisions but will try their best to implement them because they want to make the country more successful or believe that a law needs to be enforced even if someone on their side broke it.
Not to mention: individual citizens have next to no insight into what really happens within various governmental agencies. And culturally, the tendency is to assume that one's preferred beliefs are true.
It will be used in ways not intended. The Sherman Act has been used by many politicians to go after their political advisories.
If the FTC wants to do this, then they need to go after the banks for their anticompetitive practices. How about Apple?
In the 90s, Janet Reno went after Bill Gates. It wasn't because of the browser in Windows. It was a result of Microsoft's reach into Congress, helping turn Congress over to the Republicans. Microsoft's execs didn't want the tax increases that were coming, so they went all in for Republicans. After the election, Reno directed the DOJ to prosecute M$. What a circus that was to see. Then, you know what really hit the fan, Microsoft backed Dave Stirling in California. Democrats were going to do anything they could to destroy M$.
Can you imagine someone going after Google, or Apple, because they won't let others put software on their devices? How anticompetitive is the Apple Store? Can I please remove Chrome off my Chromebook, and use Firefox? Google and Apple donate heavily to Democrats, as does Microsoft today. You're not going to see it used where it needs to be, related to technology, IMHO.
I'm not picking on Democrats, there are plenty of anticompetitive right leaning companies as well (The Banks, Oil & Gas Industry, Agriculture...).
(or make a lot of politically one sided claims without citation)
OK... but deviantbit's comment clearly presents Microsoft as the victim of corrupt government officials, which isn't really compatible with calling it M$. It seems more likely that the use of M$ in "Democrats were going to do anything they could to destroy M$" is to present M$ as a label given to Microsoft by the Democrats in order to make it easier to attack. He's trying to tell you that arguments based on the epithet "M$" are or should be unconvincing.
No democrat has asked Apple to turn those profits over, or wanted a wind fall tax. Why? Apple donates heavily to Democrats, and this is why you will never see an anti-trust suite.
You can be upset with this, but that is reality.
So you believe the government is entirely a self-serving, wholly corrupt organization, that does nothing to help the people?
This is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary proof.
Or are you assuming that everyone here is among the moneyed elite, and claiming that the government's actions are directed at reducing the power of that class to benefit the common people?
That would be much closer to the truth, but is certainly nowhere near as absolute as you make it sound.
Whatever your intent here, the absolutism you display makes your statement patently false to anyone who has any real understanding of how governments—or, indeed, nearly any large organization—work.
This is a Regan Republican era talking point. Government is supposed to work for the people but for the last 40 years it has been used as a boogieman to push agendas which are actively not in the interest of the people.
In the US much harm has been done by under staffing and purposely slashing budgets of organizations that benefit the people. The amplification of "government doesn't help" comes from those regulated by the government. OSHA enforcing safe working environments? "Government meddling in my business driving my costs up!" IRS auditing, catching tax cheats, and closing loopholes? "Government stealing my hard earned profits!" Look at the attacks on the EPA since they are trying to protect vulnerable waterways that property developers want exploit and manufactures want to dump into.
So let's fund and staff the FTC and let it go after all of them. We need government in our corner going after the Banks, Big Tech, Oil, Commercial Agriculture, Pharma, etc.
The narrative needs to change so we aren't dealing with these issues in a reactive way.
why the fuck not? It helps the american people vs helping a company
Whether it’s a net positive or negative force is basically too complex a question to answer without resorting to an overarching unfalsifiable ideology like neoliberalism or socialism.
However, rule of law, predictability, and stability are unambiguously good for everyone. Attacking businesses or people on pretexts unrelated to the underlying reason a politician wants to hurt them is a hallmark of corrupt countries.
If we decide as a society to legislate stronger union protections then sure, enforce them against Amazon (and everyone else), but it seems bad for that to motivate selectively enforcing unrelated antitrust laws.
It's bad for them too once the monopoly is strong enough that Amazon can stop caring about those things.
Preventing monopolies isn't done because it satisifies some abstract sense of justice, it's done because they genuinely hurt consumers in the long term, even if the monopoly became a monopoly because they were really good for consumers to begin with.
There’s more of an argument that it’s a monopoly employer, but they’ve been raising wages.
Amazon’s stance on or relationship to unions is not a reason for the FTC to adjust its stance.
I really can't think of a more apples-to-oranges comparison (pun not intended). The only thing Apple and Amazon have in common is that they're the A's in FAANG.
How would the FTC going after Amazon help these people?
You've just described the job market. If this employee cannot find better paying employment (assuming that the job market is operating efficiently) then it is either a skill issue (This hypothetical employee is not sufficiently skilled to demand a higher salary) or a demand issue (There is insufficient demand for your skills in the market).
We can have a fruitful discussion around job market efficiency (e.g. is Amazon a monopsony employer in some local markets), but objecting to the tone of the comment feels very out of place when this is the language that we use to describe the economy.
Amazon is awful for people who value fast shipping. They used to let you specify your shipping speed! Now the only option they offer is "it'll get there when it gets there". They also feel free to deliver things well after they claimed they would, once they're willing to give you a delivery date at all.
I actually canceled my Prime subscription this year specifically because Amazon's approach to shipping is so abusive.
Hm, lets think for a second and wonder why someone might consider Amazon or Facebook an "opponent" of the government. What's the argument here? That corporations should be immune from the government enforcing a level playing field?
Sometimes that's a good thing. "Understand[ing] the industry" often means buying into its bullshit and looking at the world from its self-interested perspective.
At least in the US, there is a very reasonable argument that the administrative agencies have overstepped.
As an example, from the FTC:
"Unfair methods of competition, the policy statement explains, are tactics that seek to gain an advantage while avoiding competing on the merits, and that tend to reduce competition in the market".
Who decides what "the merits" are, and who decides what the "market" is? They play a lot of games with these definitions. What are the merits in the smartphone business? Did apple abuse their position to unfairly take over the camera business? Is "cameras" even a market anymore? Is a camera so clearly part of a smartphone that it does indeed meet the definition of "merits"? Is Amazon abusing their position in e-commerce to take out the delivery business (fedex etc) by offering "free shipping" ? Is AWS abusing their position in IaaS to unfairly compete in the "server cpu" market? Is that even a market? Or is it not because x86 chips and ARM chips are thought of as different? Read the current case brought against Meta. The definition of "market" is... really pretty awful. Someone is just trying to make their career.
Only if you ignore most of the text of the congressional acts that have created them. If the FTC's charter consisted of that one paragraph, it would be a reasonable criticism. It doesn't, and it's not.
It's true that there's a reactionary movement in the current SCOTUS that comes up with very odd interpretations of these congressional acts (like concluding that CO2 is not a pollutant, and thereby can't be regulated as one), but just because Amy Coney legislates from the bench that the sky is green doesn't necessarily make it so.
And if you've ever interacted with an abusive corporation, you'll see that any rule, or lack of rule, which gives them more power over you, their customer/employee is obviously bad.
I, as a customer/employee/tenant would generally like my bank to not run off with my money after betting it all on red, my employer to not retaliate against me for reporting abuse, and my landlord to not throw me out on my ass because I complained about a rat infestation in his building.
Without any rules against unethical behavior, most organizations with power over you will happily turn to it, and will drive their more ethical competitors out of business.
Free market folks argue that the market can figure out every one of those things you mention. But most of them understand it isn't a free lunch.
I generally think that a case-by-case approach, with clear avenues for both rulemaking and redress, with democratic (direct or representative) control is a good starting point for solving this conundrum.
I allude to the problem of finding market solutions for ethics problems in the last part of my previous point. Markets do not optimize for ethical behaviour. Largely because of information assymetries, largely because people are not perfectly rational agents, largely because of the power imbalance that exists in many of them, and also largely because people are poor at measuring specific examples of long-tail risk.
Good rules also reduce market friction, because they let me make reasonable assumptions, like 'This product is probably not going to kill me when used as instructed, because it adheres to X, Y, Z objective standards', instead of having to go down an endless rabbit hole of 'Buyer beware, do your own research!'
This is speculation and pedantry, but: What if they do? What if they already weed out 90% of it, and the remaining stuff that you notice is the optimal amount given the cost to weed it out (no matter how said weeding is done).
It's the poster child for a perfect market environment, where everyone involved is simply trying to optimize their returns, and there are next to no rules. It's also full of hucksters, thieves, conmen, liars, and flat-out frauds, to the utter detriment of any legitimate commerce in the space.
The harder ones seem to be healthcare (massive info asymmetry) and anything related to pollution (externalities). The market has had time on those and not done so well.
Not the very much non-ideal, largely non-free markets we have, rife as they are with information asymmetry, non-commodity products, buyers with urgent time needs, and a host of other aspects that utterly invalidate the Free Market Will Solve Everything gospel that so many try to preach.
A competently regulated market is better than a "free" (ie, unregulated) market in nearly all situations.
Basically, classical economics is predicated on a knife-edge equilibrium that ironically needs government intervention in order to prevent people from deviating.
The point was that I didn't want to make the same mistakes, and I wanted to remind myself to be wary of "inside scoop" types of opinions, or placing too much weight on "reports from the frontlines", because I recognized that I was overly biased in this direction. Outsiders views, or fresh perspectives, as well as insights from a big picture also have value.
Every long gone institution or industry that now seems absurd with hindsight, also necessarily had some internal logic if it ever existed for decades.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbi...
It is also possible that this is an incorrect interpretation despite its position as the top HN comment. Note I am not saying it is incorrect, I am saying it is possible it is incorrect. Anything is possible, right. Well, almost.
FTC Commissioners are appointed for terms of seven years,^1 and no more than three can be from the the same political party. The Senate must confirm nominations. The President chooses the Chairperson. See 15 USC 41.
Commissioners frequently resign before their terms expire, but I am not aware of any instances where a Commissioner, or all five of them, as suggested by the parent comment, have been been "fired" for political reasons. Perhaps an astute HN commenter can cite one.
1. The exception is if they are filling a vacancy left by someone who leaves before their term expires.
Q.E.D.
Precedent didn’t seem to restrain 45.
45 remains the favored candidate to run as the GOP nominee in 2024 Presidential election.
"Tech" proponents try to politicise any regulation that threatens their privacy-disrepecting, anticompetitive and deceptive "business" practices but that strategy is doomed to fail. At this point politicians on both sides are annoyed by the "tech" company nonsense, perhaps for different reasons.
"... the Policy Statement repudiates the consumer welfare standard"
This is a reference to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox, and in my mind, doing away with that is an indication that FTC is doing the right (and long overdue) thing.
"A strong and active democratic government, in the common sense of the term, is an evil, differing only in degree and mode of operation, and not in nature, from a strong despotism."
This past century, common thought may have shifted to a more "dangerous evil" definition versus the original sense of "unenlightened, capricious will," nevertheless it is indeed a pleasant surprise that the FTC would act in a more "enlightened" (my opinion) or "long overdue" response to corporate misbehavior.
I mean, a law against being a jerk would be great too, but the problem is that everyone thinks the other guy is the jerk. And when we actually try to write rules down for this stuff it gets problematic quickly.
I find the same thing with liberal courts. For instance with the second amendment. We clearly have a problem here with the court system reflecting their own personal views instead of what’s written in law. But the problem is not coming from the right. Unless your point is that when a court doesn’t agree with you then they’re wrong.
But so does constructing an FTC commissioner board majority! Note that commissioners are seven year senate-confirmed presidential appointees. Similar oversight bodies exist for other federal agencies.
This is a useful reminder that such positions are intended (endowed by powers by legislation, in fact) to set rules and govern executive behavior without stuff having to go to the Supreme Court.
I'm not crossing my fingers for much, but anything they do at this point would be awesome.
The important part is, anti-competitive behaviour leads to higher prices and lower levels of innovation.
Ultimately it harms more musicians/labels than it benefits. Especially in the long run.
This shows that monopolies not only harm their own markets but plenty of sub-markets as well.
The influence successful companies have on gov policy-making is one of the best arguments against ever more specialized gov intervention in markets. The best solution is gov policy that shuts down anti-competitive behaviour full-stop.
Not creating specialized 200+ page bills that can be exploited by the big players (see how Dodd-Frank resulted in only 5 mega-banks controlling a market while tons of small/medium banks shut down due to their unrealistic requirements) - which is often what's pushed both by politicians and inadvertently by the public who buy into false narratives about punishing corporate greed.
I will sell tickets for your band/venue at whatever price you want, declare x% of the price a "fee," and give most of the fee back to you. I'll happily be the punching bag, but it won't work. Your fans will be upset with you, not me, for choosing a podunk, unheard of ticket seller that charges egregious fees.
The only reason why your band is going to choose Ticketmaster over my is because Ticketmaster already controls the market.
It’s a great racket if you can get it setup. Encore and hotels have a similar one.
Classic Uncle Sam newspeak. If there previously was commitment, there'd be no need for restatement and/or renewal. Put another way, this is a shameless way of saying, "We've been slacking." Bold.
That aside, taking it on its word, this type of hard left turns are counter-productive. No one - business or society - likes surprises. They need to set a standard, *do their jobs*, and stick to it. They might also want to send a memo to The Fed asking they refrain from pouring gas on the fire that ultimately benefits those best positioned to capitalize on said pouring.
This swerve left only means there'll eventually be a swerve right. And back again. Hardly an effective approach.
> There are two key criteria to consider when evaluating whether conduct goes beyond competition on the merits. First, the conduct may be coercive, exploitative, collusive, abusive, deceptive, predatory, or involve the use of economic power of a similar nature. It may also be otherwise restrictive or exclusionary, depending on the circumstances, as discussed below. Second, the conduct must tend to negatively affect competitive conditions. This may include, for example, conduct that tends to foreclose or impair the opportunities of market participants, reduce competition between rivals, limit choice, or otherwise harm consumers.
> ...the second part of the principle examines whether the respondent’s conduct has a tendency to generate negative consequences; for instance, raising prices, reducing output, limiting choice, lowering quality, reducing innovation, impairing other market participants, or reducing the likelihood of potential or nascent competition.
And selecting from some given examples [taken from pg 13-15]:
> loyalty rebates, tying, bundling, and exclusive dealing arrangements that have the tendency to ripen into violations of the antitrust laws by virtue of industry conditions and the respondent’s position within the industry
> de facto tying, bundling, exclusive dealing, or loyalty rebates that use market power in one market to entrench that power or impede competition in the same or a related market
> using market power in one market to gain a competitive advantage in an adjacent market by, for example, utilizing technological incompatibilities to negatively impact competition in adjacent markets
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/P221202Section5...
> using market power in one market to gain a competitive advantage in an adjacent market by, for example, utilizing technological incompatibilities to negatively impact competition in adjacent markets
A few obvious targets that come to mind here are Amazon Prime and, to a lesser extent, Xbox GamePass.
There's been a lot of talk globally but I'm still waiting to see who will be the first to move on Apple's rent seeking tactics.
iMessage...
I'm still not holding my breath for them to go after the big ISPs
I've often wondered if the infamous Google banners about "you should really be using Chrome for our websites" should be considered a form of this.
Suspecting that them only requesting it, rather than mandating it (in the message) might stop it crossing the threshold. Even though there (at least used to be) plenty of cases where (say) Firefox would outright not work properly with Gmail, so Chrome or a derivative had to be used.
I think the apps are separate too? But "bundling" is more about forcing customers to buy more than they need, not the fact that both services could be operated from the same app.
Actually the idea of modern India is mostly a product of the British, so in that aspect they are a young nation.
After world war 2, employment collapsed because of the downturn of the war economy.
From a realpolitik perspective, its a smart move. Using the marshall aid to get influence in europe, prevent your main competitor from gaining further foothold on the continent and also having market (which requires a near complete rebuildup) for your economy to divert to after the collapse of the war economy.
This singling out of Germany from Europe is Russian propaganda. The core message, as you obviously have learned, is "US is keeping Europe under its thumbs because it is afraid of losing its dominance." What they neglected to add was that this is also the position of many European elites, who do -not- want to go back to Europe before Pax Americana.
In fact, just as in US, so too in Europe and Asia, there is a division amongst the elite regarding the current global regime. It is clear why a loser like Russia would want this, but would say Japan or Taiwan, or France, or even Germany, want to go back to a world where 'balance of powers' and periodic 'big wars' are par per course?
As for US, that bill from Pentagon is not just for 'keeping America safe'. No. It is the price of the replacement of the British Empire and its maintenance of global finance and trade. That shit costs a lot of money. So if we decide to go "multi-polar", we no longer have to spend that much money - let the East Asians duke it out over who controls the island chains. US will remain a powerhouse in every way.
p.s.
re-read the above and the point is opaque. The 'cost' of living in the American era for other countries is possibility of having to sacrifice their national interest in the interest of the global order. US does this routinely btw (which gets a certain subset of Americans quite upset as you know) and so it's not just asking say Germany to give up cheap Russian oil. Remember us giving a whole chunk of our industrial base to China? That was not in our purely national interest but it was in the interest of having a peaceful global order. China had to be integrated.
So, this is my recommendation for all "multi-polar" fans. Reflect on this: WW3, if it happens, will happen post multi-polarity. Just like #1 and #2 followed the breakdown of Concert of Europe in 19th century.
There are no tunnels or fence-jumpers between Lancaster and Tolstoi.
- signed, a legal immigrant
Sapiens is pretty decent, though the first half is better than the second.
the remarkable thing is what a terrible, unlivable, ugly nation we built out of all that wealth. The Romans built imperial Rome, the French empire built Paris, the US government built... a beige car dependent urban sprawl.
Americans should be ashamed of themselves.
So I agree... BUT its survivor bias. A middle class American (say median income), would absolutely rather take suburban America in the most soulless subdevelopement over whatever a median income roman would live in.
The pretty things in Rome stayed 2000 years because people liked it. Think of everything that didn't make it. They also had hundreds of years more to build them than the US has had. The Empire State Building, much of DC, victorian homes in SF... there's plenty of lasting beauty in America. Many more cities with many more opportunities for lasting beauty. Just look at Boston, its a dynamic city with a mix of old and new... its an example of what the next Rome may look like 2000 years from now.
I think Bill Gates summarizes the theory's weakness well: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Why-Nations-Fail
The Sherman Act was the first statute, true, but its main function was to kneecap common law penalties by limiting penalty amounts. President Harrison was sincere about limiting monopolies, according to his writings, at least, but it's not at all clear that sly John Sherman (brother of railroad president and General William Tecumsah Sherman), was.
A tempting idea is to judge whether or not the final good/service is indispensable for the users (and how likely monopoly can be established), such that prices can be raised to recoup the losses. But that alone doesn’t seem to be sufficient as shown by the MoviePass collapse. Lots of ingredients to get right!
1. Early VC funds are used to subsidize Uber rides at a loss to Uber.
2. The deep discounts made Uber attractive to drivers and customers.
3. Uber's soaring popularity attracts more investment in Uber stock.
4. Uber's early investors cash out. Society is harmed as later investors lose their money, Uber drivers who invested in vehicles can no longer get work, public transit ridership is hollowed out, etc.
This is quite exactly what they did.
Selling products or services at a loss in order to drive out competitors is a classic anticompetitive tactic that has killed countless otherwise-successful small businesses.
Once you have driven your competitors out of business, there's no one left to compete with. That's why it's "anticompetitive".
And yes; there are still other companies in the same space as Walmart; that's not the point. The point is they drive out competitors in the local area where many of their stores set up, so that if the people who live there want to shop, they have no choice except Walmart.
Then they raise prices.
literally has never happened, it's just a dumb myth that makes no sense, for people who think that e.g. buses don't compete with passenger trains
With the recent price hikes Uber is no longer always a dramatic saving compared to black cabs, especially during "surge" periods. After ten years of operating at a loss, plus laws being passed about tax enforcement and driver payments, and a sexual abuse scandal, it seems like they've been forced into a bit of a reality check.
This is literally what happened.
The best recent example is Google Photos. Google announced “free and unlimited” photos storage to everyone one day. Every other paid photo app out there fell of a cliff. Nobody else could give away terabytes of cloud storage for free.
Then once there were no good competitors left, Google suddenly reversed course. Now it’s only free for reduced quality. Ok now it’s only free up to 15GB … and if you fill up that 15GB you’ll stop getting your emails!
Legitimate mafia behavior.
Is pretty hard to keep Uber, Netflix, WeWork, etc. afloat if the VC cash was so cheap to VCs.
I like Wave Broadband better where available.
Even if someone had the startup costs, they would literally not be allowed to compete because of collusion between government and entrenched business.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/robert-borks-america...
(this is a conservative publication that can't be accused of having an axe to grind against Bork, BTW).
They are & so is the parent of your post. In the US, it's common for supermarket cashiers to lookup loyalty cards by the customer's phone number. The comment you replied to is saying that the phone number <area-code>-867-5309 is almost always tied to an existing loyalty card. Lots of people just give that phone number if they want the discounts without signing up.
You can also get a copy of a barcode by various nefarious means, if needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WTdTwcmxyo
In the overwhelming majority of US television and movies, onscreen phone numbers are of the form 555-xxxx to prevent clashes with those telecoms actually hand out. However, numbers of the form 867-xxxx are perfectly valid; and when Brown University made the mistake of handing out 867-5309 to an unfortunate dorm room around 1999 or so, those people were deluged with phone calls asking for Jenny.
Mr Jones also included the area code, didn’t repeat the number in the chorus, and didn’t put it in the song title; and “Back Then” also wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous.
Allowing people who don't care about their privacy to sell it seems like a fair transaction. Sabotaging capitalism & markets by not allowing consumers and producers to engage in barter seems inadvisable.
I personally care about my privacy, so I choose not to use overbearing services. I don't think that I should rob others of the ability to trade their privacy for better deals.
Really, the ‘discount’ price is the original price.
It’s a shell game.
In fact, when almost everyone pays the ‘stalking’ price, even when they obviously don’t want to be stalked and go out of their way to screw with the program and attempt to stop the stalking, your comment seems to completely ignores actual reality, which is heavily influenced by marketing, social pressures, price pressures, etc?
You know, actual market forces in a capitalist environment?
A shell game is one where misdirection is used to point someone towards an option which benefits the person running the game if the other player chooses it, by hiding the actual choice they want through confusion and obfuscation.
Seems like a perfectly appropriate description here?
by allowing the practice, the people that are fine with being tracked are imposing a tax on everyone else.
I see it as a dodge around unit pricing. Every price has the price per item and the price per 100ml/100g/whatever is appropriate. It's the law that applies to all shops that aren't small.
Easy to compare, until you come to the discounted prices which don't have unit prices printed. They can be multi buys, Clubcard offers, bundles, or whatever.
This seems intuitively free and fair, but the same sentiment is the centrepiece of John Stuart Mill's (problematic but fascinating) examination of Harm Principle and limits of personal liberty.
Namely; not being able to sell yourself into slavery.
Ordinary people (in the technological age) are not really capable of understanding or valuing their privacy and weighting the consequences of trading it. For the same reason we don't allow children to enter contracts I think it could fairly be said the average adult doesn't have capacity to "trade their privacy".
Why should the fact that they haven't thought things through take away natural rights?
Kroger for example. Jacks prices wayyy up without 'Plus.'
Being clever, I decided to 'sign up' manually but never filled out the form or sent it in. Still gave me discounts.
Tell others about my newfound secret, and they laugh and tell me they're doing the same tracking and more via my credit card. Doh.
What was the point of the loyalty card then?
Do you think it's still that way today? I really have no idea. I worked grocery 20 years ago and remember being amazed how many people pay cash. I can't remember the last time I've seen someone pay with a check at the grocery. I see cash here and there, but mostly credit or tap. But I have no idea what the breakdown would be.
I think the loyalty programs are mainly about price segmentation and co-marketing now.
the main point of loyalty cards was (and still is) data collection (which you've managed to work around) but they are also being used to help condition the public into accepting the idea that some people get (or even "deserve" to get) different prices than other people for the exact same items because of who or what they are.
For example:
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/supermarkets-introduce-perso...
https://risnews.com/safeway-offers-personalized-pricing-prog...
Businesses always try to frame this as allowing them to offer "deals" to you, but honestly what they want is to raise prices just for you. They stand to make a killing on personalized dynamic pricing. It could massively inflate their profits (entirely at your expense) but what has been standing in their way so far is that consumers find personalized pricing to be invasive, unfair, and discriminatory. Businesses are working very hard to get the public to accept personalized pricing though and loyalty cards/programs are seen as a way to help that.
Unless you like being ripped off and being taken advantage of, try to resist and push back against personalized pricing when you see it.
See: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41272-019-00224-3
Consider airline miles. Each time I purchase a ticket, instead of choosing the best deal (fair competition), I am incentivized to choose an airline I have chosen in the past so as not to fragment my points across several accounts. And of course, these "rewards" are all a price passed on to the consumer.
It goes:
Number of stops -> arrival/departure time -> layover time -> cost.
I also feel like I only ever have 1 nonstop flight option, maybe 2. Maybe the biggest airports have sufficiently redundant flights, but even then, surely most people know points are worth 1% at most, and in my experience, flight prices differ by hundreds.
I would be confused if I learned people were buying flights based on points/miles. I assume the miles/points are mainly utilized by very frequent travelers, or people using credit card rewards.
And here's a more accessible article about the relationship: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/how-low-interest-rates-c...
Yes Apple may be forced to allow alternate stores and payment methods. But they will still collect their percentage (in Netherlands it was standard 15% - 3% discount). What happened of course is that apps ended up being far more expensive on alternate stores than on Apple's one.
And even worse for alternate stores is that it would be quite likely for technical reasons that your app could only be sold from one store. Which means you would have to give up the distribution of App Store for your largely insignificant one.
And note that this was all found to be compliant with the government: https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/13/apple-dutch-dating-apps-pa...
Besides, what would you pay Apple for, exactly, when not using the App Store?
No different to how you pay a percentage of sales for using most game engines.
Apple's APIs are proprietary, and they charge 15-30% of all digital sales to to build an iOS App. This is not different than Epic charging X% for use of the Unreal Engine's APIs to build a game.
That said, I would like to see Apple forced to document their hardware, and allow dual booting to other operating systems on their devices. While iOS can be AppStore wall garden, it should be possible for me to install Linux or Android on my iDevice / MacBook.
It is completely different. You are distributing the Unreal Engine with every game you make. You aren't distributing any proprietary code with your iOS app, it only calls up APIs that are already paid for by the user and for which the user already has a copy.
A good analogy would be me making a new control panel for a mechanical machine, where the panel has metal arms and rods that connect to the machine's original mechanisms to bring about a certain result that the machine itself would be incapable of bringing on its own.
You wouldn't say I can't distribute that new panel I made because the original machine is patented, right?
Or are you arguing in an ethical sense?
I'm not really trying to argue. I just think that is how the laws currently work (I am not a lawyer and possibly wrong).
Having your code call an API is not a copyright violation.
Apple is within its rights to request compensation. You could try to reverse engineer them, but then Apple might: 1. Sue for copyright infringement. 2. Continually change iOS so syscalls require a signed certificate in the SDK.
It’s effectively impossible to get around their copyrights on iOS and as such it’s not very different to the licensing and compensation of the Unreal Engine.
All this said, I really would prefer Apple to document and encourage Linux on the iPhone as a secondary boot option (along with a voiding of the device’s warranty). That way iOS would be locked down but other OSs on the iPhone would not need to be.
More importantly, medical eyeglasses that many people rely on to see properly.
They all deserve it, of course, but there's a finger on the scales of justice and has been since the 90s.
The only way for this to change is if the corporations start skirting on the right side of the law, and they won't do that voluntarily unless the risk is sufficiently high (see e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley). Don't blame the FTC, blame the purposeful undermining by alternating administrations.
Is it door #1: Elon Musk allegedly violating FTC restrictions with Twitter changes?
Or is it door #2: Binance seemingly doing a backstab of FTX and acquiring it, thereby throwing cryptoland into a panic?
Or is it door #3: something completely different, or a combination of both?
Because legislation like this takes a long time to produce since you have to meet with stakeholders, have lawyers review for loopholes etc.
This one is likely due Biden being done his "settling into office" period, and having begun (over the last 6–12 months) to push regulatory agencies under the executive into more democrat-oriented stances.
If there was any recent event that caused the FTC to (be told to) "pull the trigger" on this, it was the midterm election effectively "taking the temperature of the country", and finding enough confidence remaining there to push through things like this without being likely to set off widespread discontentment in the news media.
If it was a particular event it would've happened many months ago.
1. lower than the competition - unfair competition, dumping, predatory pricing
2. same as the competition - collusion, price fixing
3. higher than the competition - gouging, profiteering
All three price points are illegal.
1) If your costs are legitimately less than the competition then charging less is not illegal. If you're taking a loss to gain market share and then upping the price once the competitors go out of business that's a problem.
2) Have you seen gas stations? If setting your price to be the same was illegal there'd be so many convicted people.
3) I don't remember profiteering being illegal. Literally a ton of companies have been recording record profit and certainly people have been complaining but who was fined/imprisoned? Martin Shkreli wasn't convicted of profiteering cause it's not a crime.
Cost accounting is not a rigorous discipline. It involves a lot of assumptions, guesswork, and handwaving.
> taking a loss to gain market share and then upping the price once the competitors go out of business that's a problem.
Present a case history of this.
> If setting your price to be the same
They rarely seem to be at the same price
> I don't remember profiteering being illegal
Remember all those anti-gouging laws? Warren wants to extend them.
https://fee.org/articles/why-elizabeth-warrens-proposed-anti...
Amazon versus Diapers.com
https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-be...
> Quidsi could now taste its own blood. At one point, Quidsi executives took what they knew about shipping rates, factored in Procter & Gamble’s (PG) wholesale prices, and calculated that Amazon was on track to lose $100 million over three months in the diaper category alone.
You're right it has not been demonstrated. Maybe some governing body should investigate and come to a conclusion about whether Amazon engages in unfair methods of competition such as what is purported by Quidsi.
I'm saying: Amazon's diaper thing was the same as Costco's chicken thing. Retailers shouldn't be obliged to run every single product at a profit just in case there is a single product retailer.
e.g. Driving a car is legal, driving the getaway car for a bank robbery is not.
That's right. Quidsi had no particular insight into Amazon's cost structure.
Important quote (page 8):
> "The method of competition must be unfair, meaning that the conduct goes beyond competition on the merits. Competition on the merits may include, for example, superior products or services, superior business acumen, truthful marketing and advertising practices, investment in research and development that leads to innovative outputs, or attracting employees and workers through the offering of better employment terms."
Second of all, this is intentionally one-sided perspective to say all are illegal (its not). Personally, I say screw the giant corps, do what's best for people in society, even at the expense of profit margins. Why do we sympathize with giant corporations? With inflation rising, IMO we should expect that business take smaller profit margins to keep prices from inflating higher. What is the harm in shareholders missing out on profits a bit in 2022? Surely less to society than all the lower-income folks missing out on buying food.
To address the "all three prices are illegal" point (which, again, is not true)
1. If you price your product at a loss in the attempt to drive your competition out of business, then maybe this applies, but only maybe.
2. Only if you actually collude/price fix. You can find the same natural market price as competition without collusion. Coffee shops sell coffee at similar prices because the all the businesses have similar costs, and consumers have a limit to their willingness to spend.
3. Only if you do it under limited circumstances. Price gouging is rare. BMW doesn't price gouge for selling more expensive cars than Toyota, but buying 100% of the supply of a drug and 100x'ing the price just to make more money is bad for society, and more likely to be price gouging.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/P221202Section5...
Giant corps are the engines that drive the economy. Take them away, and you've got an economy in the dumpster. (Small businesses are the future. A healthy economy requires both.)
> we should expect that business take smaller profit margins to keep prices from inflating higher
Businesses neither aid nor retard inflation. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon caused by deficit spending. If you want less inflation, vote against the deficit spenders.
> which, again, is not true
Amusingly, your exposition admits they are all illegal, although selectively applied. Mostly for BS reasons, like Microsoft being charged with giving away a browser for free (no harm to consumers was ever established).
I didn't say take them away, I said don't prioritize them. There is no reason to cater to big corporations. No one will voluntarily not make more money, so there is no reason to assume that regulation will disincentive growth. Same way taxes don't stop people from wanting to make more money.
Make corporations do things that are in societies interest, not their own. Why do we require people to sign up for the draft or pay taxes? Not because people want to enlist, but because its good for society. Why do we require drivers licenses and car insurance and air bags? Because having competence and protections is good.
> Businesses neither aid nor retard inflation.
Today, there is record inflation constantly in the news. Many businesses are also posting larger profit margins. We could lower prices closer to their pre-inflation values if they lowered their profit margins to pre-inflation values too.
> your exposition admits they are all illegal, although selectively applied.
Yea, thats the difference between legal and not illegal in most cases?
Driving 50 mph is illegal in a school zone but not a highway. Its even more illegal to drive 50 mph into a group of children crossing the road in said school zone. The laws protect against behavior that is bad in a certain context.
> Mostly for BS reasons, like Microsoft being charged with giving away a browser for free
The Microsoft case rested on the fact that bundling the product restricted market entrants ability to compete, not on pricing.
> (no harm to consumers was ever established)
Thats not necessary to prove anti-competitive. Anti-competitive is when you're bad for competition not consumers. Specifically, the FTC claims that their purpose is to prevent monopolies, not to prevent consumer harm...
> ...the legislative history is replete with statements to the effect that Congress wanted the FTC to stop monopolies in their “incipiency"...
You said screw them.
> We could lower prices closer to their pre-inflation values if they lowered their profit margins to pre-inflation values too
That's a fantasy. Communist countries have inflation, too (and higher), and the industries don't make any profits.
> Yea, thats the difference between legal and not illegal in most cases?
The difference here is extremely subjective. Selective prosecution is a real thing, and it's not about whether a crime was committed or not.
> The Microsoft case rested on the fact that bundling the product restricted market entrants ability to compete, not on pricing.
It was about giving it away for free. (Microsoft never tried to prevent Netscape from running.) Note that everybody gives it away for free today. As for bundling, operating systems have always "bundled" all sorts of programs and utilities. My Kindle even comes with a browser "bundled" into it. Oh, the humanity!
Apple's walled garden ecosystem is far, far more anticompetitive than MS and Explorer, and not a peep from the Justice Dept.
> Specifically, the FTC claims that their purpose is to prevent monopolies, not to prevent consumer harm...
Or maybe Bill Gates did not acknowledge the authority of the FTC and the FTC decided to show him who's the boss. This is not unfounded, there was a fair amount of talk about that at the time.
Yea, I said I don't prioritize them. Glad we agree.
> That's a fantasy.
yea. Corps of course would never give up profit margin voluntarily.
> Communist countries have inflation, too (and higher), and the industries don't make any profits.
Why are we talking about communism? Some of them have inflation, some don't. Some industries make profit, some don't.
> The difference here is extremely subjective.
Good things there's a body to investigate.
> Selective prosecution is a real thing, and it's not about whether a crime was committed or not.
Hmm i don't know that doesn't seem right.
> It was about giving it away for free.
Price is a component of this case, but its not about the price, its about the business decisions and impact it had on the particular market.
> Note that everybody gives it away for free today.
So no more price undercutting.
> My Kindle even comes with a browser "bundled" into it.
Good thing there was a market for browsers. It'd be a shame if that never formed.
> Oh, the humanity!
Now we're thinking of the right people in these cases.
> Apple's walled garden ecosystem is far, far more anticompetitive than MS and Explorer, and not a peep from the Justice Dept.
I agree. And I suspect this new FTC statement is a warning that it'll change.
> the FTC decided to show him who's the boss.
And they did. And they won.
Only true if you arrived at those prices via collusion
> 3. higher than the competition - gouging, profiteering
In the US gouging is pretty much always legally defined as "raising prices by [xx%] in the immediate aftermath of a civil emergency on necessary items". People might use the terms colloquially but that doesn't make it illegal.
The same prices is evidence enough of collusion to file charges.
> In the US gouging is pretty much always legally defined as "raising prices by [xx%] in the immediate aftermath of a civil emergency on necessary items"
I.e. they can file such charges whenever they like. Note that this does not take into account the cost of supplying these goods.
All potentially illegal, but more often legal and not even controversial. The important distinction is whether the prices were set to maintain or exploit a non-competitive situation, vs. to compete in a still fair/open market. There's no issue with undercutting competitors if they exist. There's no issue with charging a brand premium. In either case, competitors can respond as they see fit. It's only when there are no competitors that these choices deserve scrutiny.