Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

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I read your post. The point I was trying to make was that Apple did something illegal and got busted for it. Amazon either hasn't done anything illegal, or hasn't gotten busted. The judgement for Apple isn't to help Amazon, it's to pay back the damaged they have done to their competitors. Since it was deemed that Apple hurt Amazon, Nook, etc, they now have to pay that back by hurting themselves.

What would be Apple's punishment? A fine? That's hardly going to deter the world's most valuable company. What they did hurt their competitors. The punishment is that they now have to help their competitors regain what they lost. This is not unprecedented by any means. In the two cases where Microsoft was deemed to have an illegal monopoly, they had to give their competitors access to their proprietary APIs (US v Microsoft, a gift to Apple and Linux vendors) and include downloads to competing browsers (EU vs Microsoft, a gift to Google, Mozilla, and Opera).

I think most of the punishments they set up for Apple are perfectly reasonable and on top of those I'd go ahead and yeah I'd add a huge fine. IDK on the amount, something at least as large as everything they've made on books and then tripled or perhaps based on the avg price of ebooks before and after times the volume i.e. what consumers paid based on the price increases Apple was responsible for.

I think the record companies (et al) might want the ability to raise Apple's prices without the governement ok-ing it so that item maybe could be modified with their input.

I think the Amazon gift is silly. You say "What they did hurt their competitors." but that's not what Apple is accused of. Apple is accused of hurting consumers while Amazon profits actually increased. You bring up Microsoft but Apple does not have a monopoly on ebooks like Microsoft did in browsers. Not even remotely. They aren't even the largest competitor. By a mile.

Was IE dominant in the browser space in 2007? It feels like Chrome or Firefox had surpassed them by then. Microsoft still got hit because it was the Most Favored Browser on the most dominant OS platform.

Again, having a monopoly isn't illegal. Abusing a monopoly to force unfair competition in a new market is illegal. Apple isn't taking the hit because they're dominant in ebooks, but because they're not playing fair with ebooks when it comes to the mobile device market where they are a strong player.

What exactly did Apple's competitors lose?

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