It's funny how almost one hundred years after the Phoebus cartel[0], Philips is still participating in anti-competitive behavior. Apparently the invisible hand of the market is not so well suited after all.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel</a>
Question for any lawyers/legal observers out there:<p>What exactly did these companies do wrong?<p>From the article, 'If those retailers did not follow the prices requested by manufacturers, they faced threats or sanctions such as blocking of supplies.'<p>Does this imply that any retailer in the EU has a legal right to sell goods at any price? If I'm a retailer reselling Asus or Phillips products at cost in order to gain market share, how is that not anti-competitive behavior as well? I don't understand why suppliers cutting off supplies to retailers is anti-competitive in this case.<p>As anyone who has done business with Amazon through Vendor Central can attest to, Amazon gives you no ability to control the sale price of your goods. Their pricing algorithms automatically adjust the price on most items "Sold and fulfilled by Amazon.com" to be the lowest on the internet.<p>To me, there is a very troubling extension of the EU's logic here. Quite famously, the high end cookware manufacturer Wusthof tried to prevent Amazon from selling its products, since Amazon was undercutting the value of its brand by offering massive discounts over prices on Wusthof's own site, and its brick and mortar distribution channels.<p>Does this mean that under this EU ruling, that Amazon could sue Wusthof for attempting to "block" its supply of Wusthof goods?<p>To take it a step further, Amazon lost money on each early-model Kindle sold. If Amazon attempted to rapidly gain market share in say the chocolate market by reselling Lindt or Godiva chocolate slightly below cost, how does the anti-trust law work out here? Amazon would arguably be engaging in anti-competitive behavior, while the chocolate maker could be fined for telling Amazon it planned to withhold future supplies?<p>I'm generally a big supporter of consumer rights legislation and enforcement, but this makes me wonder if the EU is going too far. Their ruling seems to have the potential to open up a huge can of worms, and may actually entrench the monopoly power of larger ecommerce sellers.
This doesn't surprise me. Having been in the market for a AV Receiver recently, I was amazed at how little fluctuation in price there was between all the online stores for the likes of Denon and Marantz equipment.
Now they should go over Dolby and HDCP 2.2 requirements that render good equipment obsolete and forces you to "upgrade" so that you can watch content you already paid for.
I don’t understand why did Asus, Philips and others do that? Why do they care about retail prices? They’re not earning retail price, they offer their products to retailers for wholesale prices. They’re manufacturers, can’t they always adjust that wholesale price however they see fit?
So should ASUS start selling their stuff in their own "ASUS Stores" only to bypass this? They obviously want to avoid imminent race to the bottom and commodification of their high-margin models (if there are any).<p>How does this differ from US-wide enforcements of MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) where even e.g. Amazon is fully complicit?
So where do the proceeds of this fine go? Do they do back to the purchasers of said products like in a class action? Similar question for the anti-trust fines...
Are these fines in any way based on the projection of the revenue coming from applying the illegal practices? So what I'm asking is did anyone try to calculate how much money they might have made from this and apply a fine that nullifies all those profits, to which they add a penalty for doing it in the first place?
All mature markets become cartels. The illusion of a free market is maintained to ensure monopoly are not formed but almost all mature markets are some form cartel.
Whether because our antitrust framework was successful, or just because things change over time... This sort of "anti-competitive" behaviour is not the real problem anymore.<p>These days, we have a handful of companies racing to be "the first traded trillion dollar company," with a business model built around >50% market share.<p>We have platforms, with their digital versions of the infrastructure-monopoly problem, just without the capital cost part. We have social networks, with their telephone-like network effects. The value (to users) is in everyone else using it. We have ads-and-data businesses like Google, where the value to ad-buyers grows exponentially with network size.<p>We have investors betting on monopolies. Peter Thiel's definition of monopoly (the only worthwhile strategy) is basically a spectrum. On one end you sell commodities, at cost. On the other end you have a perfect monopoly. Invest in ideas closer to the 2nd type.<p>All sorts of powerful reasons for companies to cut themselves an island of monopoly. All reasons that are not economies of scale. If monopolies really do come with stagnation, higher prices and such... We are headed for trouble. Our current antitrust frameworks don't touch on most of the problem. The likes of fb just don't fit into it.<p>Price fixing, pricing power, dumping and such are the symptoms of last year's flu, not this year's.
When companies charge too much, EU fines them for monopoly abuse, when they charge too low, EU fines them for dumping prices, when they charge the same, EU fines them for price fixing. It's almost as if laws were designed to fill EU's pockets.
No jail? As an example, if a group of multinationals illegally fix prices and gain $1 billion in extra profits and they get a tax deductible $130 million fine, where is the deterrence?
I am greatly, greatly surprised to see that Asus and other Taiwanese electronics brands still try to play these games given they haven't been present in high end markets for ages.<p>Really, we are talking about difference in between them selling 250 euro laptops vs 270 euro laptops.<p>Taiwanese consumer electronics industry got, kinda, ossified.<p>Their mainstream products are almost as boring as "white goods" these days.