Competition Needs Protection

[Commentary] To believe publishers and authors, the government just handed Amazon a monopoly over the book market: The price-fixing suit against Apple and the nation’s top publishers filed by the Justice Department last week will free Amazon to offer ruinous discounts in the booming new market of electronic books, drive brick-and-mortar bookstores out of existence and kill off publishers’ lucrative business of ink on paper. Yet there is a different reading to this story. Publishing companies — like bookstores — fear they are on the losing end of a technological whirlwind of digital distribution that will make much of what they do obsolete. They would like to stop it. But though publishers may be happy to subvert competition to protect their business, this can entail a heavy cost for the rest of society. The media industry’s efforts to limit competition date at least as far back as the 1920s and 1930s, when the emergence of radio threatened newspapers’ stranglehold of local markets.