“From the day it was filed there seemed something ill-conceived about the Justice Department’s antitrust suit against Apple and five of the six major book publishers,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“The optics, as political operatives like to say, were wrong,” P.E.D. reports. “Here was the government helping Amazon (AMZN) regain monopoly control of the e-book market by attacking companies in a wounded industry that were, as author Jim (‘Chaos’) Gleick put it, ‘gasping for air.’ …’The irony bites hard,’ wrote Scott Thorow, president of the Authors Guild, just before the suit was filed. ‘Our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition.'”
P.E.D. reports, “Now a key Democratic Senator — and important supporter of President Obama’s reelection campaign — has thrown his considerable political weight behind Apple and the publishers. In a ‘Memo to DOJ’ published on the Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed page Tuesday, Sen. Charles Schumer called on the administration to ‘drop the Apple e-book suit.'”
Read more in the full article here.
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