On Thu, 11 Oct 2012, Dave Crocker wrote:
On 10/10/2012 9:41 PM, John Levine wrote:
directs two people who are at an IETF meeting to refrain from one having
a sales discussion with the other in private.
Um, could you identify which item under 2 or 3 would describe a
sales discussion?
Saleguy: "Buy my product. I'll sell it to you for US$xxx."
Potential customer: "OK, but only if you guarantee me that that's your
best price to any customer for the next 6 moths."
Salesguy: "OK."
By way of offering a single example, I'm only choosing the first bullet of #2.
Getting this sort of "price fixing" guarantee isn't actually all that unusual
for critical sales contracts.
What would be unusual would be to not have an escape clause that allowed
the sales guy to offer a lower price to someone else if he also refunded
the different to the customer.
And it isn't an anti-trust violation ... an anti trust violation is where
two competators agree to maintain pricing and not compete, at least on
price.