Remember that the majority of publishers just recently colluded with Apple to essentially fuck over Amazon. Why would we afford them the presumption of goodwill here?
From the article: "An Amazon spokesman declined to comment"
Looks like no one wanted to talk to these reporters/bloggers. :)
I don't know the NYTimes's plan to succeed in the digital age, but acting like a 24/7 TV news outlet probably isn't that way to go.
I also worry that newspaper publishers see themselves as the publishing industry does and have a bias against digital distribution and will do anything to damage it. This piece feels anti-Amazon in an unfair way. The publishers aren't these poor underdogs, they're all well-heeled corporations with lawyers and experts. Let them hash it out.
Well, that's certainly how the Justice Department chose to see it. That doesn't make that statement the objective truth.
I still don't see how anyone can say with a straight face that the new entrant in a market is "fuck[ing] over" the dominant player. Especially when countless economists have weighed in saying that the kind of corrective measures employed by Apple and the publishers are not (and should not be) illegal and that the Justice Department basically got everything wrong.
(Google is failing me here for finding these economist opinions that I've seen in the past, but amusingly, my search is chock full of articles from before the ruling saying that economists think the DOJ is going to lose the case)
Apple gave the publishers leverage to use with Amazon, which is a wee bit different. But I'll give you "colluded", because it doesn't really matter.
I wish Google would actually find the various articles I've read in the past about this, but my recollection is that various economists have explained that this sort of "corrective measure" is actually legal and the right course of action under certain circumstances, and the ebook market (with Amazon's near-total dominance) qualifies.
You say "mainly the people being screwed", but that's not true. Amazon tried to claim that prices were lower before Apple came along, but that's actually only true for some (admittedly popular) books. Prices on other books were higher before Apple. Not only that, but the low prices that Amazon was talking about was not actually a sustainable market, but instead was Amazon engaging in predatory pricing. And predatory pricing is not something that the DOJ is supposed to be in the business of defending.
Basically, many people have looked at the overall book market both before and Apple entered it, and found that, when looking at the entire market instead of just e.g. the NYT bestsellers list, prices were not higher after Apple showed up.
It's also worth pointing out that Apple was being accused of violating antitrust laws, which are essentially laws designed to prevent unfair monopolistic practices. It seems rather ridiculous to claim that a minority player in a market could be guilty of monopolistic practices, since that generally requires being a monopoly. It's even more absurd when one of the main goals of antitrust is to promote fair competition, and yet it was used to punish the only real competition that Amazon had in the market. Basically, the DOJ used fair competition laws to hand a government-sanctioned monopoly to a single company.
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I did a bit more digging, and what Apple was found guilty of was a "per se" violation of a horizontal price-fixing conspiracy using a series of vertical agreements. I've found a MacObserver article[1] that talks about a 30-page amici curiae brief filed by two economists explaining why Judge Cote's ruling was wrong.
[1]: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/economists-on-apple-e...
There's a 3-paragraph summary at that article, which should give you a good idea of what was wrong with the ruling.
I've seen a number of other articles since the ruling where other economists weigh in and say essentially the same thing, but Google is still being difficult.
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Edit: One comment about this brief says that the DOJ didn't make these considerations because it found Apple to be per se liable, which is to say, the DOJ considered the actions to be illegal regardless of any possible motivation. Some of the other economists I've referred to argued specifically against this point, saying that these kinds of vertical agreements are not a violation of the per se rule and that Judge Cote royally screwed up in applying it. Of course, Judge Cote's ruling also said she would consider Apple to have been guilty under a rule of reason as well, but I find it hard to believe given how much evidence there is that Apple's actions were indeed in its own independent business interest, and that these kinds of vertical agreements and the provisions they contained are not in fact illegal under these circumstances (my understanding is basically that they can be illegal when used by a dominant player in a market, because it's anti-competitive, but when used by a new entrant in a market with an existing dominant player, they are ok, but IANAL).
Basically, many people have looked at the 5 publishers accused of collusion and have seen that prices were higher AFTER the collusion
The fact is that the ebook average price from the accused publishers went up, it is irrelevant for that case that the total market average prices were down.
I don't think that's true. I have never heard that the smaller publishers kept dropping their prices.
If so, can you post a single proof of that.
You're asking for "usable" sources and in fact you don't have provided a single one.
It is clear that you won't believe any source so, have a good day
> It is clear that you won't believe any source
I won't believe obviously-biased "sources" that have no real data.
In any case, I think focusing on the current prices of eBooks is not actually very helpful. Amazon has the power to set prices at whatever the heck they want. And the publishers had no recourse, because not selling on Amazon meant not selling, period. But the artificially-low prices Amazon was using for e.g. bestsellers was not sustainable for the publishers. It was not a healthy market, and there was zero reason to believe, had Apple not entered the market, that Amazon would continue selling at those prices indefinitely.
Artificially low prices are usually assumed to be good for consumers, and the DOJ certainly made that claim, but that's not true. Consumers do not benefit in the long-term from an unsustainable market. They also don't benefit from a market with no competition. The latter is what Amazon was trying to create, by keeping prices artificially low on bestsellers. This is predatory pricing, and their goal was to control the entire eBook market. Once they had complete dominance, it's reasonable to expect that they would have raised prices so they would stop taking a loss on all these $9.99 books (in case you aren't aware, Amazon was actually paying the publishers more than $9.99 for the bestsellers they were selling at that price). And in a market without competition it's very likely that Amazon would be selling books at prices higher than a healthy competitive market (like the one Apple was creating with their entry). Here's an article from a year ago with evidence that Amazon was already starting to raise prices: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/business/as-competition-wa...
Perhaps Eddy Cue is not a biased source and he admitted in the trial that ebook prices raise
http://www.cnet.com/news/apples-eddy-cue-yep-we-caused-e-boo...
> But the artificially-low prices Amazon was using for e.g. bestsellers was not sustainable for the publishers.
Why not? Publishers were paid full price. In facts publishers earned LESS money with the agency model than with the wholesale model.
> This is predatory pricing, and their goal was to control the entire eBook market.
Any proof of that? Do you also believe that DoJ lied when its investigation of Amazon found no predatory pricing?
> Once they had complete dominance, it's reasonable to expect that they would have raised prices
I think that precog police still don't exists >And in a market without competition it's very likely that Amazon would be selling books at prices higher than a healthy competitive market (like the one Apple was creating with their entry)
A competitive market where ALL the stores must sell the ebook for the same price? Where the heck is the competition?
Is this your definition of competition, fixing the prices for all the stores and books?
Because Apple leveraged an existing market where they were the dominant player (iOS). You could've said the same thing about Internet Explorer being a new entrant to the browser market, back when they fucked over Netscape.
And even if you do purely concern yourself with reading eBooks on smartphones and tablets (and ignore the fact that iBooks doesn't even exist on Android devices, and consider the Kindle to not count because it's not a general-purpose tablet), the Kindle iOS app still was the dominant player there. Apple could not leverage their ownership of iOS to give an unfair advantage to iBooks. The only advantage it had was that visiting the App Store for the first time would suggest you download iBooks, but the Kindle app had plenty of promotion within the App Store as well.
I also find your attempt to claim this is analogous to Internet Explorer to be preposterous for multiple reasons. Not only did Microsoft literally bundle it with Windows, it was a free competitor to the then-paid Netscape Navigator, and there wasn't an established market for web browsers at that point anyway. Microsoft also enjoyed an overwhelming monopoly in the desktop OS market with Windows, whereas Apple has never had a monopoly in the smartphone market with iOS.
Despite what various pundits keep claiming over and over again, iOS never had a majority share of the smartphone market.