Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

You may trust them not to abuse hypervisor access, but they still have network “meta” data - it could tell them how many transactions clear against credit processors (though not the actual amounts if encrypted), a good idea general distribution of page views With respect to time and user ip (though not the exact pages), times of day, demographics of users (Geo locations and ISPs, for example)

If you don’t trust them not to peek at what they can, don’t use them. He is perfectly right.

There are other cloud providers who aren’t competing with B&H and would be a better choice. But amazon is a direct competitor to B&H, even if they do have an IT barrier - they cross subsidize; any $ paid to Amazon helps it against B&H.

> "The solution is to create regulations & laws that prevent this behavior."

I'll take a slightly contrived and simplified set of examples to illustrate why a lot of free-market advocates don't agree with this sentiment as being correct.

1. We identify this "market failing" behavior of Amazon. I.e. Amazon does it a few times and after a while, public starts to

2. Legislators make it illegal for a platform to sell the same products as their suppliers. Easy, right?

3. Amazon alters products to not be technically "the same" so they skirt regulation. E.g. Renames "Plain Artisan Soap" to "Amazon Artisanal Soap", never mind that the product they "copied" was called "Joe's Plain Artisan Soap", and Amazon's product is advertised as "cheap alternative to expensive artisan soaps".

4. We notice and we complain.

6. Amazon complains back (maybe even a few court-cases along the way?), says certain products aren't the same. E.g. Supplier sells artisan soap, but Amazon argue their white-label "soap" isn't the same, it's just soap.

7. So to be fair, legislators start coming up with a reasonable system to identify similar products, which forces amazon to identify "similar" products in order to get them off.

8. Legislators followup and create reasonable rules and exclusions how Amazon can market their branded soap, or how closely the soap can resemble an existing product.

9. Amazon happens to also have a bunch of their own genuine products that it manufactures cheaply. Perhaps a byproduct of some sort of warehouse process they have, and they use their idle machines to make it, or something. But new suppliers come on that happen to sell something that according to regulations is "similar" to those products, and Amazon gets into hot water.

10. Amazon has to put rules, processes, maybe software algorithms to identify such a case. Remember, at Amazon scale, they have thousands of new suppliers and orders of magnitude more "products" that get added each day.

11. Regulators realize it's too difficult to figure this problem out and go to court over it. So they come up with a complaints + arbitration system to address it fairly with a "human in the loop". Think DMCA, takedown requests, etc.

12. Above regulations require paperwork, and you have to register as a platform if you get requests, you're obligated to address complaints of "similar products", etc.

Amazon implements all these rules at each stage, neverminding the "good-faith" interpretation of the original and subsequent laws put in place each time. I.e. "We just don't want platforms abusing their power to undercut genuine businesses." But at this stage we've, through genuine and honest market "interventions" and reasonable rules that seem straightforward and simple and cheap to implement, created regulatory costs that by default get applied to every new "platform" that competes in a space similar to Amazon. You've now successfully put in place regulations that inhibit and prevent competitors manifesting to compete with the existing monopoly or oligopoly.

Amazon had its own "auctions" site in the late 1990s which many people forget even existed (it's one of the few things that Amazon tried and failed at). Bezos knew that eBay was a problem as soon as they emerged, and worried that Amazon would never compete effectively against them. In many senses, he was right.

How do I know this? I worked with Bezos in the legendary "garage" in Bellevue, WA.