The Wall Street Journal has a pretty good article by Thomas Catan entitled Critics of E-Books Lawsuit Miss the Mark, Experts Say (link may expire). In it, Catan gives a pretty good overview of the Ebook “collusion” lawsuit and has some outstanding points about those who think the Department of Justice “got it wrong” (i.e. they went after the wrong company) and are really just puppets of Amazon:

U.S. antitrust law doesn’t seek to protect little companies against big ones, or even struggling ones against successful ones. Companies can grow as large as they want, as long as they do it through lower prices, better service or niftier innovations. Companies can even become monopolies, as long as they don’t get there illegally or try to extend their power by unlawfully stifling competition.

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“Price fixing is kind of the first-degree murder of antitrust violations,” Prof. Hovenkamp says. “They don’t have discretion to just walk away from what appears to be a strong set of facts that, if true, are one of the most central of antitrust violations.”

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The government might already have shown some leniency. For one, the Justice Department brought a civil, rather than a criminal, case, so no executives will go to prison. Also, the publishers that settled agreed that for two years they wouldn’t stop booksellers like Amazon from discounting. That is a relatively short period; restrictions in such consent decrees typically run as long as five or 10 years.

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“The goal of antitrust policy is to protect consumer prices”, Prof. Hovenkamp says. “It’s not to protect inefficient firms from having to exit the market.”

I really like the article because it is one of the few that gets the law right, including the economic rationale. While every blog in the country it seems is decrying Amazon, the bloggers totally ignore that the publishers BROKE THE LAW whereas Amazon did nothing illegal. Amazon is guilty of being a strong competitor, maybe even coming close to predatory pricing on some items. But they aren’t breaking the law.

Yet, apparently, the publishers who have screwed the pooch over the last 10 years and avoided any uptake on e-books wherever possible, can now take the law into their own hands, change the basic rules of commerce, and stick it to the consumer who pays more under the Agency model than they did under the old system. And for all of this, they only get prosecuted civilly and might have to undergo supervision for two years. That’s the business equivalent of being released on your own recognizance after assaulting a police officer. A slap on the wrist in the long run.

And the blogger conspiracy see this as missing an opportunity to slap Amazon for being “too” competitive. But a great article by the WSJ in the midst of lots of naysayers who wouldn’t know an anti-trust statute if it reached out and bit their publisher. Oh, wait, it did…