Fixing price of labor would be more along the lines of Palm and Apple coming together and agreeing not to pay their employees greater than "$X". This way it would not matter what company Employee goes to work because his salary would be fixed across the industry. (There are always exceptions, for example if you practice law you have to be a member of the State Bar making Bars natural monopolies - and Bars also fix the industry prices by setting the fees lawyers can charge. Yet Bars do not violate the Sherman Act)
Courts will distinguish that type of labor cost fixing from Palm and Apple agreeing to not solicit one anthers employees, which will keep their labor cost down, but this is not the prohibited behavior contemplated by the Sherman Act.
Yes, as you might recall Google was just under investigation by the DOJ and FTC for the last 2 years for potential anti-trust violations(Google recently settled this matter). Generally Google was accused of using its search power to gain an edge of market rivals.
An example of the type of alleged behavior, say you were in the coupon business and you bought ads on Google it would have cost "x", but Google used its knowledge of search and saw coupons was big business so Google created Google Offers and began buying its own ads effectively driving up the cost of your ads to "1000x".
So maybe your right, can anyone say Anti-Trust Act is used at all if some companies can set aside $500 million to make anti-trust investigations disappear? (Google is publicly traded so the $500 million set aside to settle this investigation is public record with FTC).
