Competition in the Digital Age
It looks like the DOJ is moving to follow in the EC's footsteps and investigate possible anticompetitive practices in eBook pricing. From the WSJ: The case centers on Apple's move to change the way that publishers charged for e-books as it prepared to introduce its first iPad in early 2010. Traditionally, publishers sold books to …
Continue reading "The DOJ, publishers, Apple and eBook pricing"
That's the scenario being put forward by AT&T today. "A feature that we're hoping to have out sometime next year is the equivalent of 800 numbers that would say, if you take this app, this app will come without any network usage." Currently, mobile users pay for data. You want to consume more mobile data …
Continue reading "What if mobile app developers could pay for data?"
Amazon has introduced a new option for publishers/authors -- Kindle Direct Publishing Select. What is it? KDP Select is a new option that features a $6 million annual fund dedicated to independent authors and publishers. If you choose to make a book exclusive to the Kindle Store for at least 90 days, the book is …
I'm currently in Brussels at the Charles River Associates conference on competition policy. The session I am participating in is about patent policy and its interaction with antitrust law. As it happened, I read a relevant book on the subject by Alex Tabarrok. It is a short eBook, Launching the Innovation Renaissance. It deals with a …
The European Commission has launched an investigation into possible anti-competitive practices in eBook publishing. The European Commission has opened formal antitrust proceedings to investigate whether international publishers Hachette Livre (Lagardère Publishing, France), Harper Collins (News Corp., USA), Simon & Schuster (CBS Corp., USA), Penguin (Pearson Group, United Kingdom) and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holzbrinck (owner of …
Continue reading "EC launches eBook collusion investigation"
Here is a fact. The FCC recently announced it would move to have a hearing about the AT&T and T-Mobile merger. In response, AT&T withdrew its application from the FCC, delaying the hearing indefinitely (or until AT&T resubmits the application). What is that all about? At a procedural level it is just a detail -- …
Continue reading "Mobile mergers and insider baseball conversations"
There has been much discussion over the last few days about Bank of America's decision to charge consumers for debit card transactions. It's an odd fee in that you pay $5 for the first transaction each month and then the rest of the month is free. While this is related to the Durbin reforms that …
Continue reading "Network Neutrality and Bank of America's charges"
If you have a couple hours to burn on some political theater, go and watch the Senate hearings about Google. Here is a link. Actually, as someone who foresaw the inevitability of this event, I was rather disappointed. This hearing was pretty anti-climactic. To have found this interesting you had to be a serious junkie …
Let’s talk about AT&T proposal to merge with T-Mobile. Why do the parties involved still consider this merger viable? Executives at AT&T seemed to think this merger was a good idea many months ago. For all I know, that might have been the right conclusion with the information they had then. But that was then, …
Continue reading "Puzzling over Big Wireless Carrier Mergers: An Editorial"
Consider the following situation. You are a producer of a certain fashion item (maybe, designer jeans). A clothing retailer opens up a store on the highly trafficked, High Street. They would like to stock your jeans but they insist on a low wholesale price even though they will price at full retail to consumers. You …
Continue reading "Antitrust and Apple's iPad Subscription Pricing"
Digitopoly 