"The Justice Department has sued Apple and the publishers not because the agency model is illegal—it is not—but because Apple and the publishers may illegally have conspired to adopt the agency model to restrain Amazon from creating a monopoly by determining its own pricing. The outcome of the Justice Department’s suit is unclear: some publishers have admitted the government’s charges, others have not. But what seems inevitable is that this tangled web in which the government helped give Amazon a possible monopoly, will be chuckled over by law students and their professors for many years."
