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Originally Posted by stonetools
Maybe the DOJ can weigh in and say that if the retailers refuse to provide the necessary data, the retailers don't get to discount from the publisher set price. Things are still fluid and the DOJ can still tweak the terms.
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The DOJ doesn't have jurisdiction over retail pricing unless it can claim a point of law that supports the restriction. It can veto contracts involving the settlement 3, and the other 2 publishers if they lose the lawsuit, but it can't make Amazon comply... and at this point, Amazon is possibly perfectly willing to forego all ebooks by the Agency 5, at least temporarily, while they hammer out contracts it finds more advantageous. (It may demand lower wholesale rates or extra payments to compensate it for extra data processing, for example.)
If publishers are *required* to get certain data from retailers in order to sell books to them, the retailers have a great advantage--of which Amazon's in the strongest position to leverage; BooksOnBoard and Diesel don't have the resources to say "we'll just go without your books for several months while we wait for you to agree to the terms we like."
While the DOJ is not going after Amazon, I'd like to believe they're not oblivious to the problems of handing a huge market advantage to a single retailer. (Which is different from "not taking action against a single retailer with huge market advantage," which was the state before Agency pricing. Amazon had the lion's share of the market because it had built a business plan that did so, not because of shady deals or special legal loopholes.)