I'm not sure I would want to live in a world where administrative regulations were punishable through imprisonment. I think there would be some pretty severe unintended consequences to economic activities.
Helpful definition of criminal vs. civil law: http://www.diffen.com/difference/Civil_Law_vs_Criminal_Law
This case may be more clear-cut, but that's generally why you see these differences.
In this case, why let Apple continue their service?
Or, multiply the fine by 50.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
"The penalties for violating the Sherman Act can be severe. Although most enforcement actions are civil, the Sherman Act is also a criminal law, and individuals and businesses that violate it may be prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Criminal prosecutions are typically limited to intentional and clear violations such as when competitors fix prices or rig bids. The Sherman Act imposes criminal penalties of up to $100 million for a corporation and $1 million for an individual, along with up to 10 years in prison."
Like an end to collusion to fix higher prices for customers?
What is not criminal about it? It's not a wrong against a specific person it's a wrong against everyone else who operates in that market, customers and suppliers alike. It's also a general wrong in perverting the financial systems around that market. Those who instigated such efforts certainly committed a crime in my view.
If you convert these civil violations into criminal violations those risk management techniques don't apply. You can't purchase insurance that sends someone else to jail if you are found in criminal violation of a regulation.
So what I was suggesting was that criminalizing regulatory violations would make companies highly risk adverse as well as giving regulators really big sticks to force concessions. Changing the business environment in such an extreme way is going to have lots of unintended consequences.
Does ANY for pay OS today not come with a Browser? How the hell else am I supposed to get a Browser without some form of browser? Go to the store and buy one?
Yeah, boo IE, hiss Microsoft, but honestly including core functionality like HTML rendering in your operating system is not morally wrong.
They then managed to not ship this selection screen for a year or so on Windows setup disks and ISOs. Hence they got the $1b fine.
Although to be fair, they cheated the original developers of IE out of their money, too, by promising them a cut of the sales on IE (which they had absolutely no intention of delivering, seeing as they planned to give it away for free), so it wasn't quite "at a loss".
This is kind of a weird claim. They gave Notepad and Solitaire away too. But they weren't giving any of that away at a loss; the "at a loss" concept doesn't even apply to software sales.
The wheels of justice turn slowly, but back in 1994 or so when this all happened, people did go to the store and buy netscape navigator on disk or CD-ROM.
For the historical record:
ftp ftp.mozilla.org
cd pub/firefox/releases/They can lobby for a law change but it's not acceptable that people/entities with lots of money can decide which laws they obey and which not.
“The increases at Amazon within roughly two weeks of moving to agency amounted to an average per unit e-book retail price increase of 14.2% for their New Releases, 42.7% for their NYT Bestsellers, and 18.6% across all of the Publisher Defendants’ e-books,”
https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/486691/downlo...
I'm not sure how prices have adjusted since then though.
Every time you go on Amazon and look up an Ebook priced over $9.99, and it carries a note that says, "this price was set by the publisher," that's a book that Amazon would sell you for less money if the publisher let them.
It's hard to find a clearer-cut case of price fixing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/07/10/a-jud...