decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
Monopoly or Market leader, what's the difference? | 555 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Monopoly or Market leader, what's the difference?
Authored by: Wol on Saturday, October 27 2012 @ 07:34 AM EDT
The problem is defining a market. There is no monopoly abuse in the tablet
market, because the difference between a tablet, netbook, smartphone, et al is
small and there are plenty of competitors.

Personally, I think a blanket ban on buying market share above 20% would make
sense, but you can't really enforce that at a "small nation" level.

As an example of the mess constrained thinking can cause, look at the shoe
polish market in the UK a few years back. We had 100% of the market shared
between two companies, Cherry and Kiwi. They wanted to merge.

The MMC stepped in and said "we're going to investigate - we don't want to
have one company with 100% by default". Bearing in mind the shoe polish
market is part of the wider shoe cleaning market, and the polish market was
eroding rapidly, the company pushing the merger did exactly as it threatened -
it wanted out, and because it couldn't sell, it shut down. So the MMC got what
it didn't want (100% market share by one company), along with a couple thousand
lost jobs!

And the MMC had no comeback against that outcome - the company that shut down
was haemorhaging, and the planned merger was intended to save jobs, not money.

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )