91–100 of 348 posts
being a monopoly on its own is not illegal under the antitrust laws. Illegal monopolization requires both 1) monopoly power and 2) that the firm acquired, enhanced, or maintained that power by using exclusionary conduct. Exclusionary conduct includes things like predatory pricing, exclusive agreements, refusing to deal with a company, most-favored nation clauses, designing your product or service in a way that exclud…
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I'm not a huge Uber fan, but in their case at least I don't think you're being entirely fair. My home airport is SFO. The official taxis there have an extremely annoying pricing policy: if your destination is more than 20 miles form the airport they add a $50 surcharge to the cost of your trip. (I live 25 miles away.) And you can't summon a cab with an app. If you're at the airport they are very convenient. If you ar…
Serious question: once the taxi industry has died what makes you believe that Uber won't implement similar policies?
If I don’t take the cheap fare today, it doesn’t buy me anything in the long run anyway. Present dollars saved are a certainty, and if history repeats, there is a reasonable likelihood of future disruption being my easy-our for an anticompetitive Uber.
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They are not using their browser monopoly (which doesn't exist) to force people to use their search product. That would be the corollary to the Windows -> Internet Explorer case.
How about using Android dominance to push their search or other services? They were forced to unbundle in the EU but no action from the US. If they were held to the same anti trust standard Microsoft faced, they would’ve had anti trust cases against them already.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a huge Uber fan, but in their case at least I don't think you're being entirely fair. My home airport is SFO. The official taxis there have an extremely annoying pricing policy: if your destination is more than 20 miles form the airport they add a $50 surcharge to the cost of your trip. (I live 25 miles away.) And you can't summon a cab with an app. If you're at the airport they are very convenient. If you ar…
Serious question: once the taxi industry has died what makes you believe that Uber won't implement similar policies?
> Amazon gives its own private label products and first-party products an advantage over competitors in a number of ways, from algorithmic ranking, to the buy box, to premium advertising, to direct to consumer marketing, to exclusive customer reviews. Alphabet does absolutely the same but have more power in advertising & page ranking plus collects petabytes users data using Chrome browser and Android platform. Walmar…
Let me restate the article's argument: Amazon has enough monopoly power in certain categories to abuse that power to harm competition, and Amazon chooses to do so. Would you still disagree?
This generalizes nicely!
What if a company has enough power in certain categories to abuse that power to harm competition, not directly for itself, but for its clients and advertisers? I'm thinking about YouTube here. YouTube has enough power in certain categories to abuse that power to harm media enterprises on the YouTube platform. Some people argue that YouTube does so to the benefit of other media enterprises who happen to pay YouTube for advertisement.
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> Is there evidence of Amazon driving a company out of business by abusing this position? If there is then that could be a problem. No, it really is not a problem. Amazon does not have a monopoly on consumer purchases. If your livelihood is dependent on selling on Amazon, a company which sells tons of products first party , then you need to be prepared from day one for the possibility that Amazon is going to bring a…
Is that not a conflict of interest then? To operate a 3rd Party Marketplace while also harvesting said marketplace's data and then deliberately targeting top products, killing those 3rd parties in the process?
I just don't get it. Do you think someone selling a generic product that only differentiates on price has some unalienable right to make money on Amazon.com? Or that some wholesaler buying branded products has an inalienable right to somehow not get squeezed out when the only value they provide is placing POs with a vendor?
I think I can generalize that the problem with Amazon is similar to many of the modern tech companies in that they're super well funded and aren't expected to make a profit which allows them to undercut incumbents. Amazon can price lower than Target/Wallmart/B&N/Local Stores, lose money every year while the competition slowly dies. Uber can price lower than local taxis, lose money every year while the competition slo…
That was a bad example.
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I'm not a huge Uber fan, but in their case at least I don't think you're being entirely fair. My home airport is SFO. The official taxis there have an extremely annoying pricing policy: if your destination is more than 20 miles form the airport they add a $50 surcharge to the cost of your trip. (I live 25 miles away.) And you can't summon a cab with an app. If you're at the airport they are very convenient. If you ar…
Serious question: once the taxi industry has died what makes you believe that Uber won't implement similar policies?
I don't think that Uber is a good example in the original context.
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> You take the stance that only competition can breed this but in this case reducing competition has breed these points too. It's neither. It wasn't active competition (or the lack of it, or it being reduced) that generated that outcome. It was Bezos (just as it was Sam Walton before him), he dictated that approach as the basis for Amazon's best likely ability to reach massive scale. There were no possible alternativ…
This is my point exactly. Someone was going to do it. Amazon did it. So if today its Amazon and tomorrow someone else, why be up in arms about it?
Because it doesn't matter who ultimately made an anti-competitive world marketplace, it's still anti-competitive and ultimately impossible to run morally when you participate in it in parallel. eg if ebay was undercutting other people's auctions via buyout prices under their own brand