We’ve seen a lot of press from various publishing interests hoping that the alledgedly collusive Agency Model will continue. Now, finally, we see something from the standpoint of the consumer. From an article in MacWorld:
Ebook price fixing will cost consumers more than $200 million this year, and U.S. antitrust authorities should take action against Apple and a group of publishers, the Consumer Federation of America said Monday.
The U.S. Department of Justice should take “vigorous action to stop this abusive practice,” wrote Mark Cooper, director of research for the Consumer Federation of America, in a letter to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee.
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The price-setting practices by Apple and the five publishers “constitute anticompetitive, anti-consumer collusive” behavior, Cooper wrote in his seven-page letter to the subcommittee. “Collusion between firms to set minimum prices is ‘slam dunk’ illegal, especially when one of the first effects of the price fixing, after increasing consumer cost, has been to raise publisher profits.”
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“As technologies lower the cost of production and distribution, a scrum develops over the social surplus that is released,” he wrote. “The sellers of information goods seem to think that because consumers were willing to pay a high price for their physical products in the past, they can keep the price high for digital products and pocket the cost savings as increased profit.”
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