EU opens antitrust investigation into anticompetitive practices by Corning | Hacker News Reader

EU opens antitrust investigation into anticompetitive practices by Corning

ec.europa.eu

111 pointsimpish920834 comments

When I owned a cafe, a Coca Cola rep once came by and we set up a deal wherein I would get display refrigerators to put in my store and Coca Cola would resupply them with product.

After a point, I found I could buy other drinks more cheaply from Restaurant Depot and filled the fridges with them, reducing my orders from Coke. They must have realized because the rep returned and asked me to only store drinks we bought through them in the fridges.

How is this situation any different? Are suppliers unable to offer you a discount in exchange for exclusivity?

> How is this situation any different?

They asked you not to put their competitors' stuff in 'their' fridge. They didn't say that you weren't allowed to buy competitors' stuff without their permission, or require you to inform them if competitors even _talked_ to you.

Like, whether Coca Cola should be allowed do that is another question, but it _is_ a very different thing, and certainly a far less aggressive thing.

For what it's worth, though, both the FTC and the EC have repeatedly investigated Coca Cola over various anti-trust issues, including around how they deal with distributors.

not if they have monopoly status

> How is this situation any different?

CocaCola corporation kindly asked you to put only CocaCola corporation products in a fridge produced and owned by CocaCola corporation.

They didn't ask you to stop selling competitor products, let them know when you buy competitor products and certainly didn't ask for the receipts and told you them they will try to price-match them, and only allow you to buy competitor products if and only if they can't price match, which effectively limits what you can buy and sell.

On top of that what CocaCola corporation did has no place in law terminology, but what Corning allegedly did has a place [0].

[0]: https://www.ipglossary.com/glossary/english-clause/

Competition matters.

If Coca Cola had reached an exclusive deal with 90+% of all retailers it would probably be subject to investigation.

It's the same story for all these anti-trust cases. No single action is inherently prohibited, it's the abuse of a dominant position that makes it problematic.

Another way to put it: the EU wants a competitive market, not a "free" one. It won't be waiting for an invisible hand to somewhat magically balance things.

Thankfully, Trump has indicated that these sorts of anti-US measures, that Biden was too weak to deal with, will be met with equivalent investigations and sanctions on comparable EU companies. If I was a European company, like LVMH, that depends heavily on exports to the US, I might be getting a little nervous reading about a new EU investigation into another US company.

Everybody knows, like the man said, "Trade wars are easy to win"... right up to the moment the other side starts buying grain from Brazil instead of the American midwest.

Both sides lose in a trade war and Europe is in a worse starting place

Which I would also welcome because it makes them focus more on the EU which makes EU less dependent on US

At some point, the US will run out of trade partners if it sanctions all those who denounce its anticompetitive practices

Anti-US measures, as in… investigating anti-competitive business practices?

You're saying this as if the EU is just doing this for the hell of it. That's frankly just silly. And yes, I would expect that if an European company would be guilty of anti-competetive practices over there in the US, that the company would get repercussions.

And, well, if Trump wants to challenge us in a trade war again, be our guest. It probably won't go any better than last time.

I know the enlightened conventional wisdom is that the trade war between the U.S. and Europe was a push, but I’d argue the U.S. actually came out ahead.

Trump’s tariffs forced the EU to confront trade imbalances, especially around autos, and secured concessions on agricultural and energy imports, with the EU agreeing to buy more U.S. soybeans and liquefied natural gas. The U.S. also won a major WTO ruling on Airbus subsidies, allowing for tariffs on $7.5 billion of European goods, which put significant pressure on EU industries. Additionally, by pushing back on Europe’s digital services tax, the U.S. defended its tech sector and compelled the EU to negotiate at the OECD.

Altogether, Trump’s approach didn’t just expose EU dependence on the U.S. market but also reset the tone, signaling that the U.S. would take a much tougher line on trade going forward—arguably positioning America for longer-term advantages.

The US identified much of the same issues, and even wrote similar laws to curb them although they became stalled in bureaucracy.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/10/6/21505027/congress-big-t...

The thing though, is that they're not anti-US measures.

This kind of thing is also necessary if we are to have a chance to compete with China. With Chinese companies I can just go on a company website and buy things like synthetic sapphire, hydrothermal quartz in large sizes, silicon carbide wafers, etc. with the price right there.

Call a European, American or Japanese firm, and they'll say no and won't even give you the price. Similarly, if you look at a running shoe, what can you buy a similar shoe for from these Chinese manufacturers? 1/10th the price, probably?

This means that prices in the west have become disconnected the physical reality because of agreements between manufacturers, middle men etc. If prices are this wrong it's going to make economic calculation in the west impossible, in the same way that Hayek imagined it made economic calculation impossible in market-less systems.

For market systems to have any use it's therefore not enough for you to have secure capital ownership or something like that-- you must have actual free markets, with it being easy for new competitors to enter so that the physical simplicity of certain things becomes apparent, because if you don't the prices can be such that a thing that should cost $10 costs $100, or $1000, and then it starts distorting things at the next level, people put off buying a shoe which should cost half what their lunch costs or for a company to try to use as little of some input as possible, not realising that that input is actually cheap and easy to make.

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