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Comment by sbuk

11 years ago

Monopoly is not antitrust. Abusing control of a market is. A monopoly (which is usually considered to be dominance if a market place) is not itself unlawful.

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sbuk

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AJ007  11 years ago

This sounds like an antitrust issue:

"This makes life extremely difficult for the only company brazen enough to sell an Android fork in the west: Amazon. Since the Kindle OS counts as an incompatible version of Android, no major OEM is allowed to produce the Kindle Fire for Amazon. So when Amazon goes shopping for a manufacturer for its next tablet, it has to immediately cross Acer, Asus, Dell, Foxconn, Fujitsu, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and ZTE off the list. Currently, Amazon contracts Kindle manufacturing out to Quanta Computer, a company primarily known for making laptops. Amazon probably doesn't have many other choices"

  • dsuth  11 years ago

    Yeah, that's a serious problem for me, essentially using their leverage with the Google platform to keep competitors out of the market. Not cool Google.

alexeisadeski3  11 years ago

Anti trust is the legislation policing monopolies, at least in the US, and it is such legislation which I consider bunk.

  • sbuk  11 years ago

    Antitrust laws exist to enable greater competition by stopping businesses behaving in an anticompetative manner. They don't necessarily exist for "policing monoploies" anywhere in the world.

    >"and it is such legislation which I consider bunk"

    Why? Don't you think that Microsoft should have been reprimanded over their abuse of the OS market to gain control of the browser market?

    Or is it because it's being held over $favorite_faceless_corp like the proverbial sword of Damocles?

    • throwawaykf  11 years ago

      To be fair, Microsoft also created a browser that, for its time, is pretty widely accepted (even around here!) as being much better than the Netscape counterpart. So while they did throw their weight around, it's not clear that their browser dominance was purely because of their OS monopoly. There were many other ways that Microsoft was leveraging its monopoly which deserved antitrust scrutiny, but I think bundling a browser was the wrong thing to be prosecuted for.

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