Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Not strange.
Price fixing helps the entrenched players. Kobo wants agency in Canada because they're top dog. In the US agency got them exactly nowhere.
Amazon on the other hand lost nothing significant.
Even Apple, with a prenegotiated agency deal took nothing from amazon, only from the other epub vendors. Which is where the lawsuits are coming from.
They aimed at Amazon and hit everybody else.
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Once more, no matter how many times people assert it, agency pricing is NOT PRICE FIXING. All it means is that the publisher gets to set the price. Each publisher is free to set their own price. The real anti-trust fall out in all this is that by turning anti-trust and monopoly on it head with their rather novel re-interpretation of the existing laws, the Justice Department and Judge Cote have enabled Amazon to gather more and more market share. It should surprise no one that Amazon is using their dominate market position to strong arm suppliers. This sort of thing is what happens when the government tries to pick winners and losers.
And of course, it should surprise no one that the lawyers are circling Apple looking for a big payday and pushing to get things going before the original case is heard by the appeals court. They are hoping that they can get Apple to give them some money to go away before any potentially advice rulings come out. The next step will be the lawyers making a discovery demanding to see every email send by an Apple employee since Apple was started or some such level of legal harassment. The whole point is to be so annoying that Apple will give them money to go away.