Anti-competitive and price-fixing are two different things in this case.
Essentially all suppliers (publishers) agreed to set a price on their goods, that's a cartel.
We like to think of books such as Harry Potter when considering publishing, but Harry Potter is a unique item because it has more or less unparalleled popularity. Other fiction books aren't really in competition with Harry Potter, people don't normally say "I am going to either purchase Harry Potter or Hunger Games". They generally purchase both if interested.
Now consider something that is much more of a commodity: Cookbooks. It's quite easy to find a couple of cookbooks from competing publishers, and if one new type of cookbook proves popular (Gluten-free Cooking!), most other publishers will come out with a competing cookbook. Great you say, sounds like competition! Except they have agreed to sell all their cookbooks at $10, so we, the consumers,
now have a plethora of books to choose from, but only at one price. That is very, very illegal.
If the different companies had independently decided to change how they charge for books, ok, but their meetings and apparent coordination not just of the agency model, but the actual price makes this a cartel.
The anti-competitive piece is more about Apple making sure Amazon could not undercut the price for competition. Apple wanted 30% profits, no matter the price, and couldn't do that with Amazon in the mix. Apple could have just signed an exclusivity deal for certain books or something, but instead it wanted all books this way, which made it get involved with the publisher's coordinating. Conspiring with the publishers to specifically target a single player (Amazon) is apparently illegal, although I don't know much about that part so much.
If you usually filled up your car at the local station and suddenly an App Station opened across the street and all gas everywhere was suddenly 30% more expensive, the anti-competitive nature would be readily apparent.
I don't think it's true that they agreed on a set price. eBooks are sold at various prices. What they agreed to was the ability to set end-user prices. Do you have any insight into the legality of that?
Any publisher could set the end-user price for any of their books (speaking of cookbooks, I recently bought a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in paper...$40, but I would not likely pay $40 for another french cookbook I'm not so familiar with, that's price power due to the popularity of that singular book, not a cartel agreement). The problem is the collusion to raise prices in lock-step with other publishers.
The fact it was 9.99 or 14.99 or .99 isn't the problem, it's the fact the publishers colluded together to artificially raise prices. If the price of ebooks was $1000 for some non-collusive(right word?) reason, the government would likely do little, but if the price of ebooks was $.05 by fiat, the government would step in.
It's a weird little world we live in, where the law recognizes multiple players in a market agreeing to artificial price fixing is bad for markets (and people, the actual reason for the law, the constitution doesn't care about markets), but at the same time grants strict monopoly rights to individual players in markets via patents and copyrights.
They also talked quite a bit about specific price points ($12.99 and $14.99 instead of $9.99 according to the complaint). That's more than the ability to set end user prices.
Sure, but $9.99 and even lower are still options which do in fact get used. Apple didn't set prices, they provided publishers with a range of options that included the old price point.
Essentially all suppliers (publishers) agreed to set a price on their goods, that's a cartel.
We like to think of books such as Harry Potter when considering publishing, but Harry Potter is a unique item because it has more or less unparalleled popularity. Other fiction books aren't really in competition with Harry Potter, people don't normally say "I am going to either purchase Harry Potter or Hunger Games". They generally purchase both if interested.
Now consider something that is much more of a commodity: Cookbooks. It's quite easy to find a couple of cookbooks from competing publishers, and if one new type of cookbook proves popular (Gluten-free Cooking!), most other publishers will come out with a competing cookbook. Great you say, sounds like competition! Except they have agreed to sell all their cookbooks at $10, so we, the consumers, now have a plethora of books to choose from, but only at one price. That is very, very illegal.
If the different companies had independently decided to change how they charge for books, ok, but their meetings and apparent coordination not just of the agency model, but the actual price makes this a cartel.
The anti-competitive piece is more about Apple making sure Amazon could not undercut the price for competition. Apple wanted 30% profits, no matter the price, and couldn't do that with Amazon in the mix. Apple could have just signed an exclusivity deal for certain books or something, but instead it wanted all books this way, which made it get involved with the publisher's coordinating. Conspiring with the publishers to specifically target a single player (Amazon) is apparently illegal, although I don't know much about that part so much.
If you usually filled up your car at the local station and suddenly an App Station opened across the street and all gas everywhere was suddenly 30% more expensive, the anti-competitive nature would be readily apparent.