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Originally Posted by rhadin
The Agency Model is not price fixing no matter how you cut it. There is no agreement on price between the publishers; at best there is agreement on a distribution model, which is no different than what existed before the agency model.
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There is agreement between distributors, locking each other into "no selling lower than us" contracts through the publishers. And it's possible that there are agreements between publishers, establishing that $9.99 is "too low" for ebooks and agreeing not to allow their current bestsellers to be sold at that price.
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Each publisher is free to set its own price for a book. John Grisham could be sold at $16.99 for the hardcover and Stephen King at $79.99.
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They are not free to set their own prices for ebooks, by the current Apple contracts. Saying, "they could raise/lower the price of one of their other products to be able to change the price of this one" isn't the same.
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It is wishful thinking that the agency model is illegal, but it isn't. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that manufacturers can set minimum resale prices without violating antitrust laws as long as they didn't conspire on the prices. Ever notice how little Sony products are discounted?
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I don't think the agency model is illegal, but it's possible that the contracts requiring that competitors aren't allowed to sell at a lower price are illegal.
I don't know if these contracts & sales models count as price fixing, but I'd certainly like some serious attention paid to it. The *result* is that customers will be unable to find many ebooks outside of the industry-standard price ranges, regardless of what stores would like to sell them for--and that certainly seems like price fixing.
Whether it is or not depends a lot on whether such things are measured by specific contract details or industry results.