Comment Re:Another failure by the court. (Score 2) 84
Now let's be fair. Amazon earned its monopoly (or near-monopoly) legitimately. They didn't muscle anyone else out of the market; they built an amazing product—the proverbial "better mousetrap." No one before or since has managed to make buying and downloading e-books as pushbutton-simple as the Kindle. You push a button, you get an e-book on your device—no fiddling around with sideloading or copying files necessary. That moved e-books from being a super-geek early adopter's toy into something Grandma and Grandpa could enjoy.
The late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the decision in a landmark antitrust case that explains that companies may legally have monopolies if they earned them fair and square, through their own products or infrastructure—and they can't be compelled to share the fruits of their labor with anyone else.
But even then, I didn't buy from Amazon myself. As one of those super-geek early adopters, I was a member of Fictionwise's Buywise discount club that let me get some great deals on books. But agency pricing effectively killed that club dead, and then killed Fictionwise itself dead, and Barnes & Noble was nice enough to let me copy most, not all, of the e-books I'd bought and paid for over to its servers. (Thank goodness for Apprentice Alf!) And they weren't the only smaller competitors to get knocked out of the market, either.
All because Apple wanted to sell e-books for its iPad, but didn't want to have to wrestle in the low-margin dirt with Amazon. I only wish they'd had to suffer a harsher penalty for it in the end.