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Where Warren’s Wrong

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Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#61

Post by Cyph0n »

apcragg wrote: post #31
anon0000 wrote: post #14

Noticeably absent from Warren's target list is Comcast. IMHO, they are more anti-trust than any of the tech companies she is targeting. Comcast also happens to be the 15th biggest donor to her campaign. https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/contributors...

Wow. Your post is so misleading it borders on outright lying. Those $31k contributions come entirely from individuals. Comcast the company did not donate any money to her. Conflating individual contributions with Corporate contributions is massively misleading. Comcast has 164k employees. Do you honestly expect that most employees of Corporations agree with the political goals and objectives of their parent companies…

If the donor's employer has no impact whatsoever, then why is the employer listed at all?

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#62

Post by replicatorblog »

mschuster91 wrote: post #45
replicatorblog wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like the weakest part of the argument — Walmart, Kroger, Walgreens, Costco, and every other major retailer has a similar program. All use sales data to determine what sells best and copy it. I did this for a decade, designing store brand medical devices for all the major retailers. There are plenty of legitimate critiques of Amazon. The "private label" one is by far the weakest.

The difference between the other major retailers and Amazon is the search. When I go through a physical store I will see everything that they have up for sale and have the choice of buying everything - but on Amazon the sheer amount of products that are showing up in searches is the problem. Hard enough to compete against other vendors for the place on the first two search pages, it's unfair that Amazon gives their o…

With Amazon, I have the ability to list my product, and buy ads pointing people directly to it.

With physical retailers, I have to hope I can convince the retailer to stock it, often have to pay up front for shelf space, and then have to continue to pay co-op fees for advertising services of dubious value.

Moreover, with Amazon, I know exactly how many units have been sold at any time and have the ability, for a fee, to get feedback from the buyers. With retail, you only get a rough estimate of sales, usually lagging by a quarter, and have no easy way to survey buyers.

I'm not saying that Amazon is acting like a great corporate citizen, but having worked with Amazon and most of the major national retailers, I'd take Amazon in a heartbeat.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#63

Post by ChrisLomont »

mschuster91 wrote: post #45
replicatorblog wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like the weakest part of the argument — Walmart, Kroger, Walgreens, Costco, and every other major retailer has a similar program. All use sales data to determine what sells best and copy it. I did this for a decade, designing store brand medical devices for all the major retailers. There are plenty of legitimate critiques of Amazon. The "private label" one is by far the weakest.

The difference between the other major retailers and Amazon is the search. When I go through a physical store I will see everything that they have up for sale and have the choice of buying everything - but on Amazon the sheer amount of products that are showing up in searches is the problem. Hard enough to compete against other vendors for the place on the first two search pages, it's unfair that Amazon gives their o…

Plenty of physical stores do that too - place their brand at eye height, in more places, featured in their ads, etc.

Amazon controls a large but minority of pretty much any market their in, until you start making smaller and smaller market definitions to the point of being ludicrous. As such, not being a monopoly, they're perfectly fine to do all this they want.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#64

Post by re-actor »

dnautics wrote: post #19
monster2control wrote: post #4

While I agree to some extend with the author, he too is making large leaps without truly backing them up. He's fighting over semantics. While Warren may be wrong in her history, she's not truly wrong in the results. Amazon does exactly what she says, Amazon sees a Marketplace item is selling really well, so they start to sell it too at or slightly cheaper. The reason people tend to use Google over Yelp as in his exam…

It wasn't Microsoft's meddling with the browser that was it's major anticompetitive sin; it was it's control over the bootloader. https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ Yet here we are, and windows is not at all the dominant consumer os, and is not the dominant general purpose os any longer.

Windows still hovers around 90% market share, how is that not dominant?

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#65

Post by akiselev »

Shivetya wrote: post #26
comnetxr wrote: post #16

Agree 95%, but one point he uses to crticize Warren seems wrong: Where Warren says "America’s big tech companies have achieved their level of dominance in part based on two strategies: using Mergers to Limit Competition,..." he argues that they achieved dominance by making good products and were already dominant when they started making major mergers, and that Warren doesn't understand this. It sounds like he's missi…

Sorry, but the idea that Apple needs to be separated from the App store is ludicrous. If you don't like the App store don't buy Apple products. There are hundreds of other phones to choose from and some get equal or better reviews. It would be one thing if Apple was the only cell phone maker in existence but that is so far from the truth. Amazon and online purchases, again, there are so many choices that you never ev…

> She is doing what politicians do best, using resentment, jealousy, and more, to gain more power and money. Not just at the voting booth but by intimidating companies into contributing more the PACs and political campaigns. We see this all the time and sadly people buy into it because using market tested phrases has become standard operating procedure for politicians. They pay to find out how to divide people.

Perhaps it is better to learn about Elizabeth Warren's history and check publicly available data about her funding before throwing up your hands and lazily announcing that "both sides are the same"? [1] Alphabet employees gave her almost $50k but the company itself has given her nothing, through PACs or otherwise. In the 2018 cycle, she received less than 1% of her campaign and leadership funding from PAC sources, with less than a third of that coming from business PACs (grass roots orgs like Emily's List make up the majority).

Her entire career has been built on doing the exact opposite of your allegation.

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/contributors...

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#66

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

patrec wrote: post #42
Shivetya wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but the idea that Apple needs to be separated from the App store is ludicrous. If you don't like the App store don't buy Apple products. There are hundreds of other phones to choose from and some get equal or better reviews. It would be one thing if Apple was the only cell phone maker in existence but that is so far from the truth. Amazon and online purchases, again, there are so many choices that you never ev…

There are just two phone makers in existence: Google and Apple. If you care about privacy and security, there is just a single phone maker: Apple. The only difference between different brands of Google phones is how much additional insecurity and crap the notional manufacturer adds on top. Amazon has complete dominance over books in the US and are on their way to abolishing book ownership outright.

If apple is the only phone maker to offer privacy and security, why would we break them up?

Amazon is abolishing book ownership because they invented a better way to read books (kindle and audible). How is breaking them up going to make people want to own books again? The only way that would happen is if you make kindle and audible worse. How would that help society?

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#67

Post by mstolpm »

mschuster91 wrote: post #45
replicatorblog wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like the weakest part of the argument — Walmart, Kroger, Walgreens, Costco, and every other major retailer has a similar program. All use sales data to determine what sells best and copy it. I did this for a decade, designing store brand medical devices for all the major retailers. There are plenty of legitimate critiques of Amazon. The "private label" one is by far the weakest.

The difference between the other major retailers and Amazon is the search. When I go through a physical store I will see everything that they have up for sale and have the choice of buying everything - but on Amazon the sheer amount of products that are showing up in searches is the problem. Hard enough to compete against other vendors for the place on the first two search pages, it's unfair that Amazon gives their o…

Funny you mention that. Because my experience is different: I often have to wade through shady marketplace offers with hundreds of fake reviews and paid ads. I have to dig deeper or explicitly search for AmazonBasics products to even find the USB cables or tablet stands from Amazon itself.

It might be that personalization is in effect here (or some sort criteria), but I sometimes would like to better filter marketplace offers I don't even trust.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#68

Post by gamblor956 »

everdev wrote: post #53
mtmail wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"[Amazon] has captured 43 percent of all internet retail sales in the United States, with half of all online shopping searches starting on Amazon. In 2016, it had over $63 billion in revenue from online sales in the United States — or more than the next 10 top online retailers combined. It controls 74 percent of e-book sales, is the largest seller of clothes online and is set to soon become the biggest apparel retail…

43% is a massive market share but a monopoly by the definition of the word has near 100% control of a market. I think the modern test is is it possible for someone to compete with Amazon? Costco and Wallmart certainly do. If you break up Amazon, I think online retail will just move to the next biggest player.

That is not, not has it ever been, the legal definition of monopoly.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#69

Post by phillmv »

jmrobertson wrote: post #29
chj wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite some shady stuff going on in the App Store. People have to live with that, because there is no alternative. https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/sneaky-subscriptions-are-p...

Right, so imagine separating Apple/Google totally from its current oversight position, and having a totally open app store. Like the world _just_ got past learning not to click 'download here!' on a browser, and that was after 20 years of the internet. I'd be open to alternative proposals, but separating the App Store with no replacement is not a secure solution by any means and causes more problems than it solves, a…

I don't understand why people should not be permitted to go to netflix.com to install the netflix app, or to twitter.com etc etc

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#70

Post by colmvp »

mtmail wrote: post #44
cm2187 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually amazon is the one that I would say doesn't have a monopoly. It doesn't have a monopoly in the retail space (far from it), nor in the cloud hosting (let alone server hosting) business, nor in online streaming (music/tv). Google on the other hand has close to a monopoly on search (and browsers). Facebook on social medias.

"[Amazon] has captured 43 percent of all internet retail sales in the United States, with half of all online shopping searches starting on Amazon. In 2016, it had over $63 billion in revenue from online sales in the United States — or more than the next 10 top online retailers combined. It controls 74 percent of e-book sales, is the largest seller of clothes online and is set to soon become the biggest apparel retail…

Internet shopping is still very much a small share (~15%) of all shopping that occurs in the United States.
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