Buying items online in Europe should be straightforward. You search for the product you want, you might well use a price comparison site, you check your favourite sites to see whether it’s available even less expensively and you buy.

This works as long as someone discloses their price.

Which is where recent events in the US are becoming interesting. A number of manufacturers are preventing online retailers from putting prices online in that territory.

The reason behind it is that following a key ruling in an American court, manufacturers now have greater freedom to forbid companies from advertising their goods below a certain price, so you find out the cost at checkout. In Europe, the rules on retail price maintenance are stricter, but this has not stopped some brands from trying to water them down.

It’s all part of an attempt to control retail prices. Premium goods manufacturers want their goods to retain premium prices and they perceive anything else as a race to the bottom.

But forcing others to conceal prices or dictating minimum prices doesn’t answer this. Make the items desirable enough so that people will want to buy them and you’ll satisfy the customer, the retailer’s profit increases and everybody’s happy. A hidden or enforced RRP is little more than a fig leaf.

One of the Web’s greatest strengths as a trading medium is its complete transparency. I want to buy a book, I check all the sites and I choose the best offer, following my own preferences on price and the site’s service levels. Yes, this might put pressure on prices (unless it’s a rare collector’s item in which case multiple buyers might drive it up), but that’s how a competitive, open market works

I can only hope that transparency will be restored. Everywhere.