Well if Apple felt that Amazon was acting as a monopoly, and unfairly blocking them from entering the market with low prices why did they not request an investigation from the FTC instead of doing something they knew was illegal?
Litigation takes a really long time. By the time you win, you've lost.
Jobs wanted to launch iBooks right now and was willing to cut corners to get what he wanted.
We should be precise here. Jobs preferred to cut legal corners with respect to the antitrust laws instead of cutting financial corners by directly competing with Amazon on price.
To me, this is exactly the sort of choice the legal system should punish, even if Jobs had been right about the merits of his hypothetical antitrust complaint against Amazon (which he almost certainly wasn't - Amazon has testified that the Kindle store was a sustainable business on its own, i.e. that the headline new bestseller discounts were more than covered by profits on backlist titles). The antitrust laws, like other laws, shouldn't have exceptions for "justified" vigilantes. That way lies chaos.
Nicely put. I'll note that phrase down for future use.
Otherwise, the underlying assumption is that regulations on industries are always in the best interest of the market, even when the industry changes OR that regulations change fast enough to adapt to the market. Both of these, I think, are demonstrably false.
For example, for the moment, Uber are running a version of their service for people with physical disabilities - this is probably solely in response to the argument that lack of regulation would result in no such service existing. If there were no threat of regulation, would they run it? Probably not, it's probably not very cost-effective.
The majority would probably happily use cheap, dirty energy for as long as they can, but what externalities does that have? If it were possible, would it be OK to run such a power station against the law?
I understand that Apple violated the letter of the law with the price fixing. But I'm having trouble seeing the actual harm it did to the market. And I'm especially having difficulty feeling "sad" that Apple was able to bundle, into the cost of the ebooks, the potential fines for violating it. Consumers were given a product for a price they deemed fair in a market more competitive than before Apple entered it.
From some reading, I think the issue is basically that as a result of Apple's collusion with the publishers, Amazon could no longer sell without significant markup - thus price-fixing. I could be wrong.
If I break into warehouses, steal merchandise by the truckload, and sell it at a tenth the price, that also benefits my consumers.
I think that's a good approach: someone openly breaks a rule that they think is unfair and/or outdated, and then society can decide whether to re-evaluate the rule or fine them (even into bankruptcy, if they're a company).
Some places say Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe). If I had to guess, though, it's hundreds or thousands of years old.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
Disney used it in a slightly modified form: "Better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission."
http://freakonomics.com/2010/06/24/quotes-uncovered-forgiven...
Telling me that it's just a sentence isn't persuasive in any way. Showing me something mostly similar from before 1986 would do a lot more to persuade me.
Oh, you don't know who the Beechers are. They're from the 1800s.
I deliberately invoked Galt because the book is appeals to the same group that thinks the law doesn't apply to them (when convenient),and they also believe they own/are themselves "the engine of the world". See BioShock for an equally fictional critique of what happens when the "best individuals" are left to their devices, without pesky laws.