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throw7yesterday at 1:09 PM2 repliesview on HN

This sounds exactly what anti-trust laws are for.


Replies

graemepyesterday at 3:52 PM

It does not look like the laws are working!

Enforcement is erratic, fines are small, and the incentives to do things like this are strong.

They have had this problem for five months. How many customers have they lost in this time?

hktyesterday at 4:19 PM

Regrettably competition law doesn't really work like this: in the US it doesn't kick in until consumer prices are affected, and in the EU it is a combination of consumer prices plus market fairness. Market fairness could be for technical stuff like this but to the best of my knowledge it hasn't done anything so fine grained. The only example that comes to mind is when Microsoft were forced to show alternative browsers in Windows. No idea if they still have to do that or not, but it is a much higher level thing that is much more readily understood.