It's a different standard of measurement. American anti-trust is about preventing a monopoly from harming consumers via perverse incentives; European anti-trust

It's a different standard of measurement. American anti-trust is about preventing a monopoly from harming consumers via perverse incentives; European anti-trust is about preventing a competitor from driving other laborers out of the market (less emphasis placed on the end-result to the consumer). Case in point (though it was France-specific, it highlights the difference in viewpoint): Amazon was fined by the French government because their discounts + Amazon Prime discount exceeded a legal limit of how deep a discount you were allowed to give on books. That limit was in place due to lobbying efforts by the book-seller's guild; it has nothing to do with bringing consumers the lowest price possible and everything to do with preventing individual sellers from driving each other out of business via short-term loss-leading discounts. Whether or not Amazon could offer its discounts because of more-efficient processes that minimize their overhead (such as being able to ship books to people only when needed instead of holding a bunch of brick-and-mortar real-estate to locally warehouse unsold merchandise) doesn't even enter into the discussion---drop below the critical price, pay the fine.