qveau, thanks for elucidating the issues. Not to mention managing to decipher what I was trying to describe. When I read what I'd written, I couldn't understand it, so I'm impressed that you not only understood what I was meaning but were able to explain how it anti-trust, anti-monopoly, anti-anti-competitive pricing, not to mention anti-predatory pricing laws cover the situation.
I understand what you mean and that makes sense. I would not want to see you try to explain that to a jury of ordinary blokes and blokesses picked off the street. They'd be bewildered with the chain of logic within a couple of sentences.
I wonder how predatory pricing laws would apply to my proposed Globalstar pricing wherein the minutes are given away until the system gets busy, then the prices are jacked up until supply and demand balance whereupon another constellation would be built, when prices would again be lowered below cost.
Such pricing would stop competitors and during the supra-competitive phase, when the system is getting busy, profits would be enormous and wayyyy past the cost price and any prices competitors might charge. But they wouldn't dare enter the market because the next constellation would see prices slashed again, though not to free because the combined systems would be still quite busy.
The overall impact would be harm to subscribers because they would be paying more than a competitive market would dictate. Hmmm. On second thoughts, the overall prices would be lower than having competition charging sufficiently to be profitable. We actually had two stupid competitors charging sufficient to be profitable, but of course very few subscribers signed up because the prices required to make two systems profitable while being used not very much were so high that few subscribers bought the services.
But I can see how a court could easily argue that giving away the minutes to fill the system quickly, ready to jack up the prices to supra-competitive levels, and to keep competitors out in the meantime, would be illegal.
It's seems to me there's a lot of smoke and where there's a lot of smoke and mirrors and money, there are fire, lawsuits, judges and decisions which end up with large transfers of funds from the evil monopolist to the envious.
I will keep a weather eye on this space. Thanks for your thoughts on the matters.
With W-CDMA ASICs at low market share, as pointed out, there is obviously not yet a monopoly in hardware that would bring on the hyenas.
I'm not so sure about the perpetually leveraging intellectual property and software realm.
Since the unit costs of software and intellectual property are near zero when spread over a billion buyers and are already very low, as shown by 90% profit margins, it's obvious that supra-competitive prices are being charged, and consumers are being harmed as they could buy those products cheaper in a free market, if competitors were able to sell their software and intellectual property without having to face a giveaway product from QUALCOMM.
Like an octopus, QUALCOMM could keep expanding the portfolio in all directions, giving away with one arm, keeping competition out, to take with 3 others, pulling everyone and all the money in the world to their greedy central beak.
Okay, that's not strictly a legal argument, but I think that's the way people start to think, if they even think that intellectual property should have any protection at all.
As C2 says, that will be an excellent problem for shareholders to have.
Mqurice |
