Book-pricing Collusion

[rowyn]

Whoa.

 

The US Justice department is threatening suit against Apple and five major publishers, alleging collusion to raise book prices.

 

This is a fascinating situation to me. I do find it hard to see the whole agency-model thing as anything other than collusion to force Amazon to stop discounting e-books.  OTOH, it's not exactly clear that letting Amazon discount their way into the position of sole retail outlet for ebooks is the path to less monopoly power.

 

I don't know much about the law in this case, or what outcome I am rooting for.  But I'll be interested to see how it goes.

Comments

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

The way I understand it (which is pretty vague, I mostly looked into it when MS was being sued) is that collusion is always illegal, but using your market power to drive other people out of business is only illegal if you have a monopoly.

The laws are intended to encourage competition, basically -- but suddenly if it looks like one person is going to actually *win* they do a 180 and start punishing it instead.