Personally, I thought that the dispute over ebook pricing was long over. I really had no idea that Apple was still fighting accusations of antitrust violations. But, yes, Apple still is.
Curiously, I think Apple's meta-arguments are valid. It suggests something is wrong with the way Amazon does business.
In actuality, this whole case has to do more with price-fixing than anything else. Apple teamed up with five publishers to fix the prices of ebooks in an effort to attack the dominant player in the arena, namely Amazon. What it did was technically wrong.
Apple is crying foul, arguing that the U.S. government is taking the side of a monopolist—Amazon. The company also says it's ridiculous to attack its consortium because it constitutes being against competition.
Three partners in the scheme—Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster—make Apple's position weaker because they have agreed with government and settled. Macmillan and Pearson are still trying to figure out what to do.
The Wall Street Journal outlined the original complaint as thus:
The five publishers and Apple hatched an arrangement that lifted the price of many best-selling e-books to $12.99 or $14.99, according to the suit. The publishers then banded together to impose that model on Amazon, the government alleged. "As a result of this alleged conspiracy, we believe that consumers paid millions of dollars more for some of the most popular titles," said Attorney General Eric Holder.
It sounds like price-fixing to me. Apple and its band of publishers seem to think they are somehow getting screwed over by Amazon's low pricing structure.
For years, big New York publishing companies have hated Amazon. It lowballs their book, sells new books at used book prices, abuses review copy policies, screws up the royalty system with authors, and generally refuses to play ball with the big boys.
Apple sees this as anticompetitive or monopolistic. The irony is that once monopolies are established, they tend to eventually gouge the customer, not the suppliers. Just the opposite is happening here. In fact, Apple and its gang are the ones acting like a monopoly with higher prices!
This is a very convoluted situation. I cannot see how Apple can justify it or expect to win if it fights it. The company is obviously thinking in some new dimension.
I am surprised that all this happening in the first place since no administration in Washington has been much for getting on any antitrust bandwagon. Companies have been gobbling each other up like crazy and nobody blinks an eye. You want to see price-fixing? Look at the airlines. It's ridiculous. So why ebooks?
Some people blame Apple's cavalier attitude toward lobbying—in other words, throwing money at Congress in some form or another. It doesn't do it.
If Apple wants to keep fighting this, then maybe it should rethink the way it does politics.