Antitrust, Apple, and the Publishing Business.

• Author: Batkins, Sam

United States v. Apple: Competition in America By Chris Sagers 336 pp.; Harvard University Press, 2019

Of all the noise policymakers and the press make about antitrust law today, concern about "bigness" consumes most of the oxygen. Rarely is there a conversation about anticompetitive practices, price fixing, or the costs and benefits of attempting to break up certain companies.

In United States v. Apple, Cleveland State law professor Chris Sagers cuts through this noise with a careful look at America's antitrust history as well as the publishing business in the United States. To some extent, the title of the book should emphasize "competition" because, at times, the Apple case is only tangential to the author's larger argument that antitrust has failed because American politicians "doubt markets extensively."

For the uninitiated on the Apple litigation, the firm is alleged to have engaged in an unlawful price-fixing scheme in which it and five major book publishers conspired to fix and raise the price for electronic books in a bid to compete against Amazon. When Amazon learned of these agreements, it sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking regulators to investigate. The publishers quickly bailed on the agreements and settled the case with regulators, but Apple has fought on, defending the legality of its arrangements.

To date, all the courts that have heard the case have found that Apple violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by conspiring with the publishers to fix and raise electronic book prices. However, many commentators have scoffed at the decisions, arguing they effectively knocked out Amazon's largest competitor in the electronic book market. They claimed the decisions were anticompetitive because they grant Amazon an effective monopoly in the market.

For interested readers, Sagers's work is more about the evolution and dynamics of antitrust law than a comprehensive dive into the Apple case. The details of the litigation don't appear until about midway through the book. Prior to that is an extensive history of U.S. antitrust law, the publishing business, and even a history of electronic books beginning in 1930. (Apparently, an entrepreneur named Bob Brown envisioned a "reading machine" that would facilitate high-speed reading via microfilm.) Those eager to tackle the intricacies of the publishing business and antitrust will find Sagers's work offers plenty of specific detail.

On antitrust, perhaps the reason the Apple case...