5 ms·

Funny how making books cheap is considered a failing.

by c1b 6y ago

shadowgovt 6y ago
Right? That's the thing; it's not. Not by consumers, anyway. Now, French book-sellers, on the other hand, appreciate the law that keeps them in business for aesthetic reasons, whether or not it makes economic sense or they can stay financially competitive when the price of data transmission has crashed past too-small-to-meter-per-word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Law
- sciurus 6y ago
  This is something interesting I was completely unaware of. It's not just France, lots of countries have legally fixed book prices. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price
jaredtn 6y ago
Yeah, interesting the things people want to punish for. The inverse isn’t quite a grace.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
You could have made the same argument about Standard Oil - until the competition were crushed and prices went up. Which is why lower consumer prices aren't a valid defence against anti=trust. Nor is the argument that markets "naturally" lead to monopolies or (at best) oligopolies and cartels - even though empirically they do. So much so that setting out to create a monopoly is a bullet point on many unicorn-wannabe business plans. The problem is abuse of power without oversight. YouTube can screw over content creators with its insane system of copyright strikes. PayPal and Amazon can keep legitimately earned money on the pretext of non-existent ToC violations. Apple can decide to bar you from the App Store on a whim and clean-room your best green shoots ideas into its own products. Google can decide that you earned too much in ad revenue and shut you down just because it can. People have lost businesses and livelihoods because of these practices. The monopoly position held by these companies makes them unassailable. That's what antitrust protection is really about.
- dantheman 6y ago
  During standard oils run, the price of kerosene, dropped from 35 cents to 8 cents, and their percentage of the oil market actually decreased significantly long before it was broken up. https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-predatory-monopoly/ https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-pr...
  - Mirioron 6y ago
    I read about that a while ago. This raised the question in the back of my mind: did the investors (Rockefeller) actually want Standard Oil to be broken up? As I understand it, it ended up being incredibly profitable for them.
- dantheman 6y ago
  Antitrust protection has historical been used by lesser players to hurt their competitors and the public because they have political pull.
- CountSessine 6y ago
  That's what antitrust protection is really about. Is it? Or is that what good regulation is for? What if YouTube and their competitors all nerfed and deplatformed popular creators because of advertiser pressures? Isn’t this a better argument for regulation? Remember that the reason that Bork defined antitrust the way he did was because there wasn’t a methodical definition of where it should be applied in the 60’s, and the govt was arbitrarily interventionist.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > You could have made the same argument about Standard Oil - until the competition were crushed and prices went up. Prices didn't go up until the government forced Standard Oil to break up. It had nothing to do with the competition being "crushed"; it had to do with the government taking the attitude you mention, that lower consumer prices didn't matter. Which seems daft since lower consumer prices mean consumers, i.e., the people, are better off.
nuclearnice1 6y ago
I think you misunderstood shadowgovt’s comment.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  No, c1b got it. The comment was open-ended, but I've definitely seen pushback on the way Amazon has floored the price on books. France sued the hell out of them for undercutting prices so deep that individual corner store retailers couldn't compete.
maximente 6y ago
such a small trite comment can't really be taken by itself as a consideration of whether or not amazon has behaved in an anti-competitive manner. it's not appropriate to look at a part of amazon's portfolio in isolation; their dominance in one particular area is not particularly anti-competitive. amazon's book sales dominance, nor their dominance as an e-commerce platform, seem to be particularly egregious. what's clear, however, is that they use their e-commerce position to also one-up competitors as a retailer. they have access to data about what's hot, what could benefit from a more economic option, etc. which they can use - perhaps anti-competitively (by e.g. intentionally selling at loss to defeat the new competitor). additionally, their entire cloud computing arm affords them the opportunity to run other parts of their business at a massive loss, perhaps intentionally (again, to defeat competitors) as needed. as an analogy, imagine if standard oil also had a financial operation that low-balled "normal" banks, intentionally losing money on every loan or instrument, just so those other banks blew up.
zenhack 6y ago
Indeed, Amazon's behavior isn't the same shape as a typical monopolist. Krugman wrote an article a while back about this that I think cuts to the heart of the matter: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/opinion/paul-krugman-amazons-monopsony-is-not-ok.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/opinion/paul-krugman-amaz...

Funny how making books cheap is considered a failing.

by c1b 6y ago

Funny how making books cheap is considered a failing.

Right? That's the thing; it's not. Not by consumers, anyway. Now, French book-sellers, on the other hand, appreciate the law that keeps them in business for aesthetic reasons, whether or not it makes economic sense or they can stay financially competitive when the price of data transmission has crashed past too-small-to-meter-per-word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang_Law

sciurus 6y ago
This is something interesting I was completely unaware of. It's not just France, lots of countries have legally fixed book prices. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price

jaredtn 6y ago

Yeah, interesting the things people want to punish for. The inverse isn’t quite a grace.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

You could have made the same argument about Standard Oil - until the competition were crushed and prices went up. Which is why lower consumer prices aren't a valid defence against anti=trust. Nor is the argument that markets "naturally" lead to monopolies or (at best) oligopolies and cartels - even though empirically they do. So much so that setting out to create a monopoly is a bullet point on many unicorn-wannabe business plans. The problem is abuse of power without oversight. YouTube can screw over content creators with its insane system of copyright strikes. PayPal and Amazon can keep legitimately earned money on the pretext of non-existent ToC violations. Apple can decide to bar you from the App Store on a whim and clean-room your best green shoots ideas into its own products. Google can decide that you earned too much in ad revenue and shut you down just because it can. People have lost businesses and livelihoods because of these practices. The monopoly position held by these companies makes them unassailable. That's what antitrust protection is really about.

dantheman 6y ago
During standard oils run, the price of kerosene, dropped from 35 cents to 8 cents, and their percentage of the oil market actually decreased significantly long before it was broken up. https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-predatory-monopoly/ https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-pr...
- Mirioron 6y ago
  I read about that a while ago. This raised the question in the back of my mind: did the investors (Rockefeller) actually want Standard Oil to be broken up? As I understand it, it ended up being incredibly profitable for them.
dantheman 6y ago
Antitrust protection has historical been used by lesser players to hurt their competitors and the public because they have political pull.
CountSessine 6y ago
That's what antitrust protection is really about. Is it? Or is that what good regulation is for? What if YouTube and their competitors all nerfed and deplatformed popular creators because of advertiser pressures? Isn’t this a better argument for regulation? Remember that the reason that Bork defined antitrust the way he did was because there wasn’t a methodical definition of where it should be applied in the 60’s, and the govt was arbitrarily interventionist.
pdonis 6y ago
> You could have made the same argument about Standard Oil - until the competition were crushed and prices went up. Prices didn't go up until the government forced Standard Oil to break up. It had nothing to do with the competition being "crushed"; it had to do with the government taking the attitude you mention, that lower consumer prices didn't matter. Which seems daft since lower consumer prices mean consumers, i.e., the people, are better off.

nuclearnice1 6y ago

I think you misunderstood shadowgovt’s comment.

shadowgovt 6y ago
No, c1b got it. The comment was open-ended, but I've definitely seen pushback on the way Amazon has floored the price on books. France sued the hell out of them for undercutting prices so deep that individual corner store retailers couldn't compete.

maximente 6y ago

such a small trite comment can't really be taken by itself as a consideration of whether or not amazon has behaved in an anti-competitive manner. it's not appropriate to look at a part of amazon's portfolio in isolation; their dominance in one particular area is not particularly anti-competitive. amazon's book sales dominance, nor their dominance as an e-commerce platform, seem to be particularly egregious. what's clear, however, is that they use their e-commerce position to also one-up competitors as a retailer. they have access to data about what's hot, what could benefit from a more economic option, etc. which they can use - perhaps anti-competitively (by e.g. intentionally selling at loss to defeat the new competitor). additionally, their entire cloud computing arm affords them the opportunity to run other parts of their business at a massive loss, perhaps intentionally (again, to defeat competitors) as needed. as an analogy, imagine if standard oil also had a financial operation that low-balled "normal" banks, intentionally losing money on every loan or instrument, just so those other banks blew up.

zenhack 6y ago

Indeed, Amazon's behavior isn't the same shape as a typical monopolist. Krugman wrote an article a while back about this that I think cuts to the heart of the matter: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/opinion/paul-krugman-amazons-monopsony-is-not-ok.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/opinion/paul-krugman-amaz...