On 01/15/2009 Eugenio Perea wrote: > I see nothing wrong or illegal in making sure that the music player I > make only plays music bought in my store and vice versa. I risk becoming > irrelevant if the market doesn't like it, but that's my strategy and my > problem.
Ah, but there is something wrong with this and it is the reason we have antitrust laws. > > If that were illegal, all the printer manufacturers would be sued to > allow all cartridges to work with them, regardless of who made them. > Likewise with cartridge razors and all the businesses that rely on > "refills". There is a difference here because no one player in the printer market is sufficiently dominant to affect the market in the way that Apple is. Further, ink cartridges are parts in ways that digitally encoded music is not. There is not "bright line test" for when something crosses the line to illegal monopoly, but it depends on market dominance. Look at all of the legal manuvering on Microsoft with Netscape vs. IE and no similar fight with Apple over Safari. Windows was dominant so barriers MS imposed skewed the market, whereas OSX is not so barriers do not have the same effect on the market. iTunes/iPods approach the Windows dominance, and that is the problem. Now you can't look at actual antitrust prosecutions, because politics have such a large effect. Remember that the Justice Dept had been winning its antitrust suit before the 2000 election. When Bush was elected, he ordered the Justice Dept. to settle the suits in ways that amounted to just dropping them. And remember that this debate started here, not to discuss whether the iPod/Touch/Phone was illegal, but simply wheether it was ultimately a bad model for the consumer, and to what extent Palm might/should emulate it.
