Re Apple’s EU judgement: Remember that EU antitrust law does not require direct harm to consumers. It’s not the same as US law. Behaviour which is anticompetitive (ie using monopoly positions to stifle competition) is regarded as harmful to consumers, even if no direct harm (ie raised prices) has occurred.
@ianbetteridge
I still can’t get my head around how US regulators allowed Ticketmaster and Live Nation to create such a gigantic monopoly when it was flagrantly anticompetitive. I think they gave some assurances about ‘behaving well’.
That worked out well for all of us, then.
@blabberlicious Mainly because of the influence of Robert Bork's book on antitrust, which became the dominant legal view around the Reagan era. That view holds that all that matters is prices so if a monopoly doesn't raise prices it's fine. It was a big break with core economic theory, which holds that competition reduces prices and so lack of competition will always end up raising them. Guess what? Economics turned out to be right, longer-term.