Could be.
Agency serves to protect entrenched players and keep out newcomers so, while I expect Amazon will never publicly endorse it, they might "grudgingly" go along and let the publishers be the fall guys... just as they did this time.
Everybody harps on the market share that B&N allegedly "took" from Amazon during the price fix when the reality is their share has been flat ever since it was *implemented*.
By the time the price fix was fully implemented B&N already had their 25% market share.
Lost in the noise is that Amazon benefited more from the price fix than B&N. And they used the money they got from it more wisely.
One thing the price fix did do was let B&N, Kobo, and Amazon sell their reader devices at near cost and lock out the hardware-only vendors from the US market so all new reader buyer would be automatically sorted to Gryfindor, Slytherin, or whatever...
There has been an explosion of ereader adoption but everybody except Amazon and Nook is stuck at barely measurable hardware sales levels.
Five years down the road?
Too far out to tell, really.
First we need to see if DRM-free is a real magic bullet.
Whether multipurpose really displaces dedicated reader devices.
Whether a viable color emag market emerges.
How post-PC the "Post-PC" era really is. (Hunch: tablets are peaking right about... now... 2012-13)
Above all, how far ebook tech goes into education, academia, and the corporate world.
eBooks so far are primarily about narrative text and recreational reading. The really big money is still elsewhere.