US is set for Apple’s e-book appeal, but maybe it should be looking at Amazon instead

[Commentary] The Justice Department filed its response to Apple’s appeal of a 2013 price-fixing verdict that found the iPhone maker had brokered a conspiracy among book publishers to fix the price of e-books.

The government brief is 117 pages long and recounts familiar allegations: that Apple helped big publishers create a new pricing scheme in 2012 in order to get books on its new iPad device, and to wrest the e-book market from Amazon.

The new brief contains rhetorical flourishes such as “publishers fear and loathe $9.99 E-book pricing,” and also makes the unlikely assertion that Apple organized the conspiracy because it “cared about iBookstore profits” and about earning a 30 percent commission (unlikely since e-book revenues are chickenfeed to a company that sells hundreds of millions of iPhones).

The most interesting part of the brief, however, may be the Justice Department’s descriptions of Amazon. Even though Amazon is cast as one of the victims of the conspiracy, the brief reveals the immense power the retail giant held over the publishing world in 2011.

This begs the question of why the Justice Department continues to train all of its antitrust fire on Apple, which continues to be an also-ran in the e-book market with a market share reportedly around 10 percent for most publishers. Why not investigate Amazon instead? Section 2 of the Sherman Act holds that a company violates antitrust law if it has monopoly power and uses that power in improper ways.