Ugh more whining from Stross. What a headline: Betteridge's Law and "Amazon, have you stopped beating your wife yet?" combined in one. Amazon's negotiating tac

Ugh more whining from Stross. What a headline: Betteridge's Law and "Amazon, have you stopped beating your wife yet?" combined in one. Amazon's negotiating tactics are not unique and don't make them evil. B&N pulled the same tricks when negotiating with Simon & Schuster last year: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/business/media/simon-schuster-and-barnes-noble-reach-a-deal.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/business/media/simon-schus... It's a common incident in the television industry as well. Time Warner dropped CBS last year while negotiating a fee dispute: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/04/us-timewarner-cbs-blackout-idUSBRE97309G20130804 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/04/us-timewarner-cbs-... It doesn't matter that one party is in a stronger negotiating position than the other. That's capitalism; don't hate the player, hate the game. p.s. The DOJ anti-trust lawyers never had a focus on preventing monopolies before the '80s. Their focus has always been on the prevention of the abuse of market power whether by monopolists or oligopolies. If Amazon should be targeted for having an ebook monopoly then Apple would have been on the hitlist first for having a digital music monopoly that they managed for half a decade before the Kindle.