A lawsuit accuses Amazon plus the four giant book publishers of fixing prices on e-books distributed anywhere but on Amazon.

I doubt that whatever damages they have to pay for this will make them really stop doing this. I expect instead that they will find a different way to dress it up. But this use of their market power is only a symptom: the disease is that they control so much of the market.

We need laws that effectively prevent so much concentration of any industry, regardless of how that concentration was or is achieved. Antimonopoly law, or better said antioligopoly and antioligopsony law, should discard the question of whether excess concentration was achieved by "unfair" means or not, and focus on protecting society from the unjust power that concentration generally tends to create.

Achieving a fair, competitive price for the not-really-sale of e-books would not make them cease to be unjust. The principal injustices of commercial e-books today are in the other aspects of their distribution: imposing DRM and its concomitant nonfree reader software, carrying an antisocializing contract instead of actual purchase, and requiring the not-really-buyers to identify themselves.

I would rather do without the e-book than submit to those wrongs.