Senator Charles Schumer, in an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal:
If publishers, authors and consumers are at the mercy of a single retailer that controls 90% of the market and can set rock-bottom prices, we will all suffer. Choice is critical in any market, but that is particularly true in cultural markets like books. The prospect that a single firm would control access to books should give any reader pause.
The Justice Department lawsuit is also unsettling from a broader perspective. As our economy transitions to digital platforms, we should be celebrating and supporting industries that find ways to adapt and grow. By developing a pricing model that made e-book sales work for them, publishers did just that.
If you remember, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in April against Apple and publishers for pricing collusion. But as Scott Turow noted, Amazon was already practicing an anti-competitive model:
The irony bites hard: our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition.
Let’s hope that the Department of Justice heeds Senator Schumer’s apt advice.