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Originally Posted by JustaBloke
The free market doesn't seek to restrict businesses from differentiating themselves in order to gain commercial advantage. The free market welcomes and embraces such activities.
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Again, nothing to do with the discussion. Such activities should indeed be embraced and Sky's unique mixture of HBO content and other miscellaneous content would be a good way of doing that. They could have done that without preventing HBO from supplying their content to other platforms.
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I'm at a loss to respond to your inexplicable desire to go back to your fuel example as it has no relationship to this conversation. Petrol is a fuel, a necessity to individuals and to our country's economy more generally. HBO programming isn't. Which is why the authorities are perhaps a little less keen to reap nuclear armageddon on Sky than you are. 
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It's merely a more extreme example of a company forming a cartel to control supply and distort the market. As for being essential to individuals, I'm sure that back in the day, Norman Tebbit would have pointed out that bicycles are also available.
---------- Post added at 22:17 ---------- Previous post was at 22:09 ----------
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Originally Posted by andy_m
I'm glad somebody has finally drawn the distinction between necessary fuels and luxury TV channels!
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Originally Posted by JustaBloke
I've just been shopping in ASDA. They wouldn't accept my Tesco Clubcard. They said Tesco say they can't accept it. How nasty can Tesco be? And I couldn't buy Sainsburys bacon there either! Vindictive, I call it...
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The fuel example was only used as it was a better illustration a company attempting to control supply of a product than the previous supermarket based analogies.