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Amazon Is a Monopoly

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Re: Amazon Is a Monopoly

#271

Post by 5trokerac3 »

blairanderson wrote: post #120

I run a consulting company for Amazon suppliers. We have roughly 2-dozen Amazon suppliers and our first-hand experience is that Amazon is absolutely stifling competition/business to the detriment of customer. The biggest problem is `agreements that restrain trade` is a monopoly practice that happens across the board. They're a black box AND have tiny support systems for their marketplace. One recent example. A client…

> A client was on track to be selling $X-million this year of some appliances. Our client was forced to to stop selling because of trump tariffs. Amazon won't accept a "higher price" from our little company that only sells $Xm/year.

A devil's advocate view: perhaps the supplier was buying low cost appliances from China, built in factories with who knows what labor standards or whether the work was compulsory, made almost certainly to a lower quality than appliances made in North America, taking advantage of China's currency and trade manipulation to mark up the price and make a larger profit than if they had distributed appliances made in a western nation with labor and wage standards.

Now the U.S. is putting the same tariffs on Chinese imports that they put on U.S. imports to their country and the supplier is having difficulty getting Amazon to bear the cost of the supplier's desire to keep the same margin.

Re: Amazon Is a Monopoly

#273

Post by ernst_klim »

skinnymuch wrote: post #265
ernst_klim wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But Telecoms and the old Robber Barons had monopolies without government forcing people. Telecoms were totally built by govs. Back in the days govs were obsessed with controlling the means of communication, so all the related biz was due to the monopoly right. > AT&T established a network of subsidiaries in the United States and Canada that held a government-authorized phone service monopoly, formalized with the Ki…

But everyone does lobbying. Singling our Comcast like that is weird to prove a point of government and telecoms. Even if they are in the top 10.

>But everyone does lobbying.

What? Your local Cafe does lobbying? Only magacorps do that, and yes, they use it to protect themselves from competition.

And no, protecting yourself from competition using lobbying, monopoly rights, patents, regulations means exactly this: big biz uses government to ensure its monopoly/oligopoly, aka governments creating monopolies.

>Comcast like that is weird to prove a point of government and telecoms

Comcast is using government to ensure its marketshare is not an example of government forcing people to use the service?

It exactly is IMHO.

Re: Amazon Is a Monopoly

#274

Post by sutterbomb »

5trokerac3 wrote: post #271
blairanderson wrote: post #120

I run a consulting company for Amazon suppliers. We have roughly 2-dozen Amazon suppliers and our first-hand experience is that Amazon is absolutely stifling competition/business to the detriment of customer. The biggest problem is `agreements that restrain trade` is a monopoly practice that happens across the board. They're a black box AND have tiny support systems for their marketplace. One recent example. A client…

> A client was on track to be selling $X-million this year of some appliances. Our client was forced to to stop selling because of trump tariffs. Amazon won't accept a "higher price" from our little company that only sells $Xm/year. A devil's advocate view: perhaps the supplier was buying low cost appliances from China, built in factories with who knows what labor standards or whether the work was compulsory, made al…

The devil usually knows a thing or two about what they speak of.

Re: Amazon Is a Monopoly

#275

Post by anthonypasq »

AlexandrB wrote: post #269
soulofmischief wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would one split up Facebook? Amazon? What would it look like?

Facebook is easy. Break off Instagram and WhatsApp. Those acquisitions should never have been allowed. Amazon might look like splitting retail from AWS or similar.

what exactly is facebook monopolizing?

Re: Amazon Is a Monopoly

#277

Post by AnssiH »

c2h5oh wrote: post #237
indopedia wrote: post #45

She forgets that the Amazon marketplace is made up of sellers and the prices aren't controlled by Amazon for a lot of their products. These are inherited from the distributor in most cases. Sure Amazon fulfills the orders but it's not like Walmart that controls the entire process. There is more freedom in Amazon. Anyways, this is just the hip thing of today. How about making a service better than Amazon? No that's im…

> She forgets that the Amazon marketplace is made up of sellers and the prices aren't controlled by Amazon for a lot of their products. 1. Amazon requires you to sell your products at the price that is not higher than at any other channel you use to sell. Even if there was a competitor that allowed you to offer a lower price because of lower fees (important on high price, low margin stuff like computers) you can't. 2…

> 1. Amazon requires you to sell your products at the price that is not higher than at any other channel you use to sell.

That is no longer the case, Amazon dropped the price parity requirement on US marketplace in March 2019 (and in EU in 2013).

However, I read recently that some sellers have instead started receiving notifications that they have been suppressed from buy box for selling at lower price elsewhere.

Re: Amazon Is a Monopoly

#278

Post by davemp »

breadandcrumbel wrote: post #272

I'm following Amazon for a long time They are a monopoly indeed But they became one only because they are great at doing business They built an empire from an online book store....

Exactly.

I recently bought a razer blade stealth through amazon, but the speakers were messed up and there was coil whine. I installed the recommended firmware upgrade but that caused Linux to crash with non-standard ACPI behavior. I decided to go through razer support because I know it's better for them.

After over a week and maybe ten hours of emailing back and forth with support, I was asked to reinstall windows and see if that worked... Instead, I just clicked a few buttons on amazon and dropped the laptop off at the local UPS store and was done in ~20min.

There's a reason Amazon is in its current position. If I had bought from the razer store directly, I would've had an even worse time.

Re: Amazon Is a Monopoly

#279

Post by skinnymuch »

ernst_klim wrote: post #273
skinnymuch wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But everyone does lobbying. Singling our Comcast like that is weird to prove a point of government and telecoms. Even if they are in the top 10.

>But everyone does lobbying. What? Your local Cafe does lobbying? Only magacorps do that, and yes, they use it to protect themselves from competition. And no, protecting yourself from competition using lobbying, monopoly rights, patents, regulations means exactly this: big biz uses government to ensure its monopoly/oligopoly, aka governments creating monopolies. >Comcast like that is weird to prove a point of governm…

It’s disingenuous to do faux ignorance by acting like you don’t know what I roughly meant when I said everyone. You know I wasn’t talking about your local cafe. Or even a $10M/year company.

Re: Amazon Is a Monopoly

#280

Post by wry_discontent »

tim333 wrote: post #258

It's not a monopoly under the dictionary definition: >the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service. It is maybe under the Sherman Act: >“Monopoly power” is generally understood to mean “the power to control prices or exclude competition”. I wish when people use words in a different way to the dictionary meaning they'd say so. Otherwise it leads to a whole lot of pointless "O…

I find that there's a huge amount of discussion that basically amounts to definitional disagreements. I'll cede definitions like "monopoly" for the sake of a discussion and continue to use them otherwise.

The trouble is those are uninteresting questions. "Is Amazon a monopoly?" immediately takes the more interesting discussion "what should we do about the size of Amazon" off the table and leaves us to bicker about what words mean. We likely won't reach an agreement about what officially constitutes a monopoly, but we can reason about what we should do in the future.

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