Apple Offering Concessions in European E-Book Suit as Several Publishers Settle in U.S.

Yes ... the agency model must be stopped ... because if I am a content owner, I shouldn't be able to set my price for my content.

This hardly qualifies as worthy of anti-trust ... just some pissed off folks who whine because the latest blockbuster isn't going for $10. Cheap bastards.

You've missed the point entirely of this investigation by the EU.

With physical books (and eBooks until the Agency model was introduced), Amazon etc would buy books/eBooks in bulk at the wholesale price agreed by the publisher. Amazon could then in turn sell the books for as much or as little as it liked, but the publisher still got paid their wholesale price.

What the agency model did was stop Amazon etc selling books for whatever price they wanted and instead imposed a price on the end-customer, with Amazon/Apple receiving a fee in return for each sale.

It's blatant price-fixing, it has artificially inflated eBook prices and it should be stopped. I hope the EU hits them with everything they've got, because price fixing in every other industry is illegal because it's anti-consumer.

The collusion was necessary. Amazon had a nasty habit of punishing individual publishers who wouldn't play ball in e-books by yanking their paperback and hardback books as well

Amazon did that in response to the Apple deal, to avoid adopting the agency model. You've got the arrow of time (and causality) backwards.

Except Amazon was consistently selling for such a deep discount that it was nearly impossible for any competitor that wasn't selling in such volume across such a wide range of products (i.e., any competitor) was unable to compete and thus Amazon had the market to themselves. Which gave Amazon the ability to dictate terms to the publishers and eventually set whatever price they wanted.

The Most Favored Nation clause was needed at the time because without it, Amazon both had the market strength and willingness to use it to regain control of the market ("You want agency pricing? OK, you sell to us for 20% less or your books are no longer for sale by us. Any books. e-Books, hardbacks, paperbacks") Things have changed and it probably should be dumped by now.

I can't imagine the concessions being accepted, particularly the two year limit on discounting. No time limit but "can discount up to 20%" might fly.

I was under the impression that the iBook publishing terms banned publishers from selling their ebooks at a lower price anywhere else, giving Apple a contractually-obligated price advantage over everyone. Given that the agreement was made with pretty much every major publisher, that's rather more harmful than shifting to the agency model would have been on its own.

Amazon's price scraping is ruining the market. That doesn't mean that the other extreme is acceptable.

It's the second time he's done that this week....

First, an MFN clause is not price fixing (in the illegal sense). Second, despite everything Apple (legally or illegally) did to level the playing field with Amazon, Apple still only had around 7% of the ebook market compared to Amazon's 60+%.