Iku Rex said:
And if pigs could fly...
In fact, even if Amazon by some miracle did become the only outlet, it would still be vulnerable new competitors if it abused its position.
In my own metropolitan area, Amazon's rise has led to the demise of almost all of the major local booksellers and the retreat of many of the major chains- we still have B&N and Books-A-Million, but that's about it.
How is this relevant to what I wrote?
People are finding online shopping cheap and convenient. Both with regards to paper books and ebooks. You would expect some brick and mortar stores to disappear. This is a normal and desirable outcome. The alternative is keeping employees and businesses around doing make-work.
Regardless, it has very little do do with whether or not Amazon has or will get an unbreakable monopoly.
No, but you can see throughout the history of their dominance the trail of failed companies that couldn't weather the storm of their annual ultra-crossover series flooding the market with titles. There is a reason why companies like Aardvark-Vanaheim are rightfully considered exceptional.
Cite?
At least you now agree that, contrary to your earlier claim, new comic book publishers have indeed entered and stayed in the market. Wasn't the whole point to get rid of all competition to achieve monopoly pricing? Even if Marvel and DC weren't competing companies - which they are - they still wouldn't have succeeded.
I think you need to look elsewhere to explain Marvel and DCs dominance.
And you still haven't explained how consumers suffered. (Provided you even care.)
Most of which- if you trace their corporate ownership vertically- are owned by Coke and Pepsi. Coke, for instance, has 450 brands offering something like 3500 different beverages...not including their non-beverage holdings..
#3 in the world? Dr. Pepper/Snapple, with just 50 brands.
And how do the consumers suffer? Are they not free to choose?
I also note that, once again, you achieve your «monopoly» by grouping two rival corporations and completely disregarding smaller competitors. I don't think that word means what you think it does...
Iku Rex said:
As pointed out in the articles, a publisher does not have to accept Amazon's terms and prices. In this case the fact that they didn't is the story, so I really don't see why you would be confused. Of course Amazon doesn't have to sell the books if they can't negotiate an agreement. And if Amazon is buying books (according to an agreement) and selling them at a loss, that ought to be cause for celebration - Amazon is effectively subsidizing the publisher. (They should buy a few million copies for themselves, but I suppose the agreed upon contract probably prohibits that.)
Except that the cross-subdidized sales cannibalized the sales of the same books at other retailers (as the publishers themselves point out in both of those stories), ...
How is this relevant? Your claim was that the publisher was unable to charge higher prices.
EDC, the dead tree publisher “will no longer sell any of its books on Amazon or to any entities that resell to Amazon” (cite
Educational Development Corporation: EDC News ) . IPG, which I was primarily talking about in the above quote, chose not to make a deal with Amazon and Amazon no longer sells its titles.
--- leading to fewer outlets available to the publishers besides Amazon. That is classic monopsonistic predatory pricing, and is illegal if done as a method of gaining market share.
And yet Amazon hasn't become the sole outlet, and has no real chance of becoming one. Much less permanently so. Once again your hypothesis falls through.
(And «classic monopsonistic predatory pricing»? There's no such thing.)
The reality is that, more and more people do their book shopping at Amazon, which has artificially low prices.
Oh noes, consumers are paying low prices! Quick, someone call the government to put and end to the horror!
What is an «artificially low price»? If Amazon thinks a greater market share will get it greater profits in the long run, it makes sense to sacrifice some profit now. There's nothing «artificial» about that. It's not much different from, say, spending money on customer service. And every competitor is free to try the same thing.
I don't know where you're getting that from- IPG's sales have dropped 50% since Amazon dropped them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/b...orn-for-publishers.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hpw.
(That was the sales of an IPG client. But I don't mind using that number for the sake of argument.)
Let me remind you of the conversation so far:
Dannyalcatraz said:
Iku Rex said:
Publishers are complaining because they want higher prices. But there is no coercion here. If they want higher prices they are free to charge higher prices.
No they can't.
You were wrong.
Instead of admitting that, you've moved the goalpost, and seem to actually be demanding that IPG's sales should remain exactly the same even though their prices are up and they refuse to cut a deal with a large popular outlet. It's simply absurd.
All Wal-mart does is shift costs to us in other ways. There are reasons California and other states keep investigating the chain- like the fact that their wages are so low that their employees often qualify for government assistance programs. The money you're saving on a TV there, you're losing by subsidizing their workers with tax dollars supporting welfare programs.
Oh, please. Now you're bringing US welfare politics into it... If the rules for welfare programs don't work, the solution is to change those rules, not singling out certain businesses for attack.
It certainly has nothing to do with whether or not Walmart is a harmful monopoly. If there really is a problem with government assistance programs and Walmart employees, the same problem would remain if Walmart had a single store, or even a tiny mom and pop grocery store with a poorly paid store clerk.
[Regarding new comic book publishers] And quickly exit or get bought out...
Untrue. You've admitted as much yourself.
And again, if the idea is to spend money in the short term in order to secure a long term advantage, it clearly isn't working. It's a sisyphean task.
There was an explosion of companies doing superhero comics in the late 1980s and early 1990s- I believe of those, only Dark Horse, Valiant and Image remain.
And but for a few titles, their sales don't match up favorably with the big 2, who control in excess of 65% of the market- #3 on that list has less than 8%. That's not competition, that's hanging around hoping not to get squashed.
Comic Book Statistics | Statistic Brain
Times change. As I recall Marvel and DC haven't exactly been raking it in every year since their founding either. But they have advantages that have nothing to do with the monopoly bogeyman. And even when your group them together they aren't close to a monopoly!
Predatory pricing is an amazing thing, and there's a reason it's illegal.
What reason do you think that is? Or are you just using a variant of the appeal to law fallacy? («The law says X. Politicians would never ever make a mistake, so X must be correct.»)
But, there is indeed a reason why so-called «predatory pricing» is illegal. It's part ignorance among politicians, and part clever manipulation by businesses that can't compete fairly.
OPEC nations that ignore the cartels demands get dinged along the road, and the top-tier producers like Saudi Arabia can- and have- reduced their production to keep prices high.
If you don't think OPEC harms consumers with price manipulation...well, I can't help you.
“Dinged along the road”? Sounds to me like they got to have their cake and eat it too, if Saudi Arabia picked up the slack. That might make sense if Saudi Arabia was using OPEC as a political tool, but not so much if they just wanted profits.
Like I said (and you pretended not to notice), OPEC is a government-run organization. Many of OPEC's decisions were based on politics, not economics.
As for the “price manipulation”, OPECs main (failed) goal has been to maintain a stable price. They tried (and, I suppose, try) to do that by increasing or decreasing the supply. Considering that oil is not a renewable resource, it is by no means a given that emptying every well as quickly as possible is the ideal approach for the consumers and the world economy. In some ways OPEC has just been doing what individual suppliers would have done, and are doing, anyway: adjusting supply to demand.
They [Microsoft] only dodged a judgement of monopoly by dint of investing in Apple at one point.
I'd call this the appeal to law fallacy again, but you actually admit that Microsoft was
not deemed a monopoly! I guess in your world-view, an accusation is proof enough.
As for the law, the only reason Microsoft could even come close to being called a monopoly was by defining the “market” extremely narrowly.
Iku Rex said:
I also note that you can now get a quality operating system for free. How terrible.
Can't get it for free all the time, either. If I want to run Windows in my Apple- which may be required to operate a few things (though I havent had to yet)- I would have to buy a new copy of it...if I wanted to be legal about it, that is.
What? I have no idea where you're going with this.
I was talking about Linux. You know, one of Microsoft competitors, disproving the silly claim that Microsoft has or had total control of the market. And then you bring in Apple, another powerful Microsoft competitor, illustrating further that Microsoft neither had nor has a monopoly.
The biggest 4 are oligopsonies that are big enough to be effectively monopsonistic.
Oh, for...
Those are
competing companies. The words you're throwing around have no real meaning when any arbitrary selection of competing companies can be declared to be a unified group.
Also, there are more than four large car manufacturers in the world.
GM's typical tactic was this: find an auto-parts maker capable of meeting it's needs for a particular design and make a contract with them. Because of their size, they would get a bulk discount...while simultaneously making the producer devote 90% pluss of capacity to meeting the contract due to its sheer size. The industry standard was that the auto maker would then have 60 days to pay. The deadline would pass without payment by GM. When the parts maker complained because they had no income and almost no other jobs, GM would offer the maker a cash settlement of, perhaps 65-75% of what they owed (effectively getting GM a further discount). This would be enough to keep the parts maker in business, but not give them enough money to expand their physical plant or increase wages. Then they had the choice of retooling their shop to satisfy other customers or keep doing business with GM.
Of course, the other major car companies were doing the exact same thing.
What you're describing is fraud. And I think it's largely a fabricated conspiracy theory that makes very little economic sense for the companies involved.
Cite?
Which is why, when those plants closed, so did their suppliers. There's a reason why large sections of Detroit and East Chicago look like sets for post-apocalyptic movies.
You really don't get that when car production drops or ends, so does the production of car parts?
There is nothing inherently harmful about a business
choosing to offer its services to a single other business. It only becomes a potential problem when not doing so is impossible. That is not the case here.
Amazon still controls 80%+ of the eBook market. At best, Apple is a distant #2.
Really?
There are no official figures but industry sources say that in the past year, Amazon's share of the North American ebook market has fallen from around 80%
to 60%.
Apple's struggle to defeat Amazon set to be exposed by European ebook inquiry | Books | The Observer
So, Amazon's market share is not 80%, and falling rapidly. How very peculiar. It's almost as if this “unstoppable monopolist” conspiracy theory isn't true, isn't it?
