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

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

#371

Post by smnrchrds »

drc500free wrote: post #358
darkerside wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a difficult thing to regulate. The instant you stop Amazon from selling on its own platform, they will open a subsidiary Amazon Retail, which is a favored customer on their platform. Whatever new regulation you can come up with, there will be armies of corporate lawyers ready to satisfy your requirements while still capturing that audience who is ready (and wants) to be captured by a platform-branded generic opt…

This seems a bit defeatist. We've successfully regulated against vertical integration in the past.

Yeah, just take a look at the financial sector. Your typical big investment bank has insider knowledge of a sizable percentage of the companies in the economy and separately, makes tons of trades. The two businesses are kept separate, no information exchanges between the two groups, no winks and nudges. If they get it wrong, they could go to jail.

If it is possible to create a so-called firewall [0] within banks to avoid unfair advantage via insider trading, it is possible to create a firewall between the platform and seller divisions withing Amazon for a similar effect.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/firewall.asp

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

#372

Post by ceejayoz »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #271
jhall1468 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absolutely not the same thing lol. What Amazon did is unethical. What you are describing is illegal.

I'm honesty curious what crime this would be. If I rent time on someone else's server, and they look at what I'm doing on that server, what illegal thing has happened?

Seems like a pretty clear violation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act.

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

#373

Post by pacala »

nateburke wrote: post #266

About 10 years ago I met the head of IT for B&H cameras in NYC. Among many things, he was in charge of the hosting for their online store. After he complained about dealing with physical servers, I asked him if he had ever considered using AWS ec2 for the website, and he replied that his boss refused because he believed that Amazon would pull data on B&H products and use it to compete more effectively. I'm not sure t…

At the very least, they own your IP traffic. From there, every single value-add service you use gives them an opportunity to eavesdrop your data. Take, for example, https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing. All of the sudden your URL traffic is 'fair' game.

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

#374

Post by adrianmonk »

philosopher1234 wrote: post #326
CodeCube wrote: post #290

So many comments about, "doesn't everyone know they do this?", and "everyone does this!" I say there should be an explicit difference between "running a platform", and "selling on a platform", and never should the two meet. By "platform" here, and in the context of selling stuff online or IRL, I mainly mean that the store should never compete with their suppliers ... it's madness and unethical. If everyone can get a…

This is a ban against vertical integration no? There are real efficiencies (apples entire premise) from owning and running the whole stack top to bottom.

It'd be a ban of any mixture of vertical integrating with not vertically integrating. Which in turn makes it tough to transition (either direction) between the two.

So, Apple would be allowed to vertically integrate and make the chips, hardware, operating system, and applications for their products. But they'd have to stop selling Belkin chargers alongside Apple chargers at apple.com, and the iOS app store would have to contain either only Apple apps and no third-party ones or vice versa.

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

#375

Post by pacala »

darkerside wrote: post #345
TimSchumann wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The is absolutely no veil between the hypervisor and the guest virtual machines. Not in the EBS either. This is 100% true. To do any useful computation on your data (read, what you're using all AWS for) they have to have 100% visibility into your data. > If they say they won't read your data, better trust them. If you don't, stay away from their datacenters. That's it, right there. All of this is based on Trust in…

This is a similar level of trust that you give to banks not to seize your money, or to your bodyguard not to do you physical harm. Stealing data from a customer paying for hosting would be _very_ different, and much more scandalous, than identifying trends on a competitive marketplace and taking advantage of them by launching competing products.

How about snooping the traffic through a load balancer service managed by AWS? That's exactly 'identifying trends on a competitive marketplace and taking advantage of them by launching competing product', except that instead of looking at sales data of products on your shelves, you look at URL access patterns for sites hosted on your platform.

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

#376

Post by [deleted] »

philosopher1234 wrote: post #326
CodeCube wrote: post #290

So many comments about, "doesn't everyone know they do this?", and "everyone does this!" I say there should be an explicit difference between "running a platform", and "selling on a platform", and never should the two meet. By "platform" here, and in the context of selling stuff online or IRL, I mainly mean that the store should never compete with their suppliers ... it's madness and unethical. If everyone can get a…

This is a ban against vertical integration no? There are real efficiencies (apples entire premise) from owning and running the whole stack top to bottom.

[deleted]

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

#377

Post by amelius »

sacks2k wrote: post #171

I saw this happening a decade ago, but I had no real proof. I had a profitable Amazon store in 2010. I found niche products that Amazon didn't sell. As soon as I started getting traction on any one product, Amazon would start undercutting me, and my sales would drop to almost zero over the course of a couple of weeks. I had near 100% feedback and I had a single customer complaint that I sold them the wrong product. W…

> It taught me a valuable lesson not to build my entire business on someone else's platform.

Lots of developers do this already with iOS and the App store.

Some people don't even have a choice. E.g. taxi drivers had their entire market turned into a platform. Same with restaurants and meal delivery.

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

#378

Post by TimSchumann »

darkerside wrote: post #345
TimSchumann wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The is absolutely no veil between the hypervisor and the guest virtual machines. Not in the EBS either. This is 100% true. To do any useful computation on your data (read, what you're using all AWS for) they have to have 100% visibility into your data. > If they say they won't read your data, better trust them. If you don't, stay away from their datacenters. That's it, right there. All of this is based on Trust in…

This is a similar level of trust that you give to banks not to seize your money, or to your bodyguard not to do you physical harm. Stealing data from a customer paying for hosting would be _very_ different, and much more scandalous, than identifying trends on a competitive marketplace and taking advantage of them by launching competing products.

I don't disagree with any of what you've said. I just think that many people are ignorant of that being the case with Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc because they assume 'Well Technology must have solved that'.

Then again, compared to the average bear, maybe I'm unusually circumspect when it comes to all of those things.

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

#379

Post by jwiley »

I worked for a small health products reseller around 2008 that had stores on Amazon, Yahoo (when that was a thing) and other marketplaces. It was well-known that any exclusive distribution deals between the health products reseller and manufacturers had a very short life: if the product was profitable Amazon would go around the reseller, negotiate a better deal, and sell it themselves.

Fast forward to today, and companies that are direct competitors with Amazon (like Netflix) are completely committed to AWS. Amazon is watching, learning, and evolving from every piece of data they can get their hands on. What better way to learn about your business model than to watch them being tested and deployed on their infrastructure?

I'm not specifically pro or anti Amazon...but I find it surprising the C-suite of most organizations seems content to think of AWS as a separate business un-related to the business that is actively trying to corner the market they are competing in.

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

#380

Post by arkades »

sacks2k wrote: post #194
a_wild_dandan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subreddits tend to wildly misrepresent reality due to survivorship bias. People generally don't post or noodle through such communities when things are going well. That's not to say there isn't a significant supplier issue -- just be aware of the company you keep. I often forget to be critical of the bubbles I inhabit. In any case, I do wonder if Amazon's treatment of folk like you would improve considerably if Amazo…

"Subreddits tend to wildly misrepresent reality due to survivorship bias" I disagree. If Amazon had great customer service, there wouldn't be a large volume of people complaining. "In any case, I do wonder if Amazon's treatment of folk like you would improve considerably if Amazon had competitio" I agree with you here. The only two marketplaces that actually get traffic are Ebay and Amazon. I've tried them all over t…

> If Amazon had great customer service, there wouldn't be a large volume of people complaining.

Volume of complainers is an absolute number. Customer service can only reduce the proportion of complainers. If you have 50 complainers on 100 customers, bad customer service. If you have 50 complainers on 1,000,000 customers, good customer service.

You can conclude nearly nothing based on the absolute number of complainers in isolation.

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