I think there is an argument about wealth inequality there. Wealth that previously was distributed among local bookstores is now concentrated in a single company and it's shareholders. That's a pretty naive analysis, but I suspect Amazon's monopoly power has contributed to America's increasing wealth inequality.
Amazon probably has more shareholders today than the total number of people who have ever owned a share of a local bookstore.
This. Most booksellers could have just sold their bookstores years ago and bought shares of Amazon and done far better because they simply can't provide a faster, cheaper and better experience for their customers than Amazon can.
Google's dominant market position was achieved through market competition not through impairing the ability of smaller companies to enter markets. Even in Google Chrome you can pick DuckDuckGo and Ecosia as your default search engine. Most of Chrome users probably never heard of those two search engines. For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket…
>> through market competition not through impairing the ability of smaller companies to enter markets. So? In the real world, antitrust isn't about how a company became dominant. The fact that a company is dominant is what matters. Legislatures know that having a market run by one entity is inevitably a bad thing. Google's success, its market dominance, is the very harm that antitrust is meant to address. How Google…
> Legislatures know that having a market run by one entity is inevitably a bad thing.
Isn't that what government is? One entity running the market?
Governments don't like competition.
Whether it is one entity or many, what matters is the welfare of the consumer, which includes allowing competition to arise that can do better.
You could have made the same argument about Standard Oil - until the competition were crushed and prices went up. Which is why lower consumer prices aren't a valid defence against anti=trust. Nor is the argument that markets "naturally" lead to monopolies or (at best) oligopolies and cartels - even though empirically they do. So much so that setting out to create a monopoly is a bullet point on many unicorn-wannabe b…
> You could have made the same argument about Standard Oil - until the competition were crushed and prices went up. Prices didn't go up until the government forced Standard Oil to break up. It had nothing to do with the competition being "crushed"; it had to do with the government taking the attitude you mention, that lower consumer prices didn't matter. Which seems daft since lower consumer prices mean consumers, i.…
> Which seems daft since lower consumer prices mean consumers, i.e., the people, are better off.
I don't think that necessarily follows; price is big, but not everything. I don't care how cheap products are on Amazon, I still refuse to buy computer storage or anything that goes in the human body since they are either unwilling or unable to deal with counterfeiting problem.
Funny how making books cheap is considered a failing.
You could have made the same argument about Standard Oil - until the competition were crushed and prices went up. Which is why lower consumer prices aren't a valid defence against anti=trust. Nor is the argument that markets "naturally" lead to monopolies or (at best) oligopolies and cartels - even though empirically they do. So much so that setting out to create a monopoly is a bullet point on many unicorn-wannabe b…
Big giant company that has been undisputed and can use it's power and money to politically influence for positive legislation in it's case == monopoly
This is interesting because it seems like the DOJ's definition of monopoly is changing, which I think is a good thing. Since the late 80s (roughly), antitrust litigation has only been brought on the basis of a monopoly's negative impact on consumer prices (i.e. does the existence of a monopoly cause the consumer to have to pay higher prices?). That ignores monopolies that impair the ability of smaller companies to en…
Google's dominant market position was achieved through market competition not through impairing the ability of smaller companies to enter markets. Even in Google Chrome you can pick DuckDuckGo and Ecosia as your default search engine. Most of Chrome users probably never heard of those two search engines. For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket…
But, Android ships with chrome installed and set as the default browser, with Google as default search engine. And 99% of customers will never even think to touch those settings. You can't break into a market that most people don't ever realize exists.
This has been a major gap between the American understanding of monopoly protection and the European one. In the European space, protection of smaller business' ability to compete is factored in. But the US space, in general, has not cared if smaller businesses can compete and tends to take a laissez-faire attitude towards business-on-business market pressures. It's the effect of the market on consumers that's paramo…
No, no, no. Amazon disrupted the grip that publishing houses had on publishing, they have democratized writing. Publishers and bookstores had restricted markets that were dictated by a few big publishing houses. Amazon disrupted that, which has lead to far more books being written. Books that have been self-published. How on earth is that considered a failing? Bookstores are no longer viable, because Amazon has obvia…
So, I though Amazon mostly got to where they are by exploiting the poorly-designed concept of sales tax by selling things across state lines, knowing full well that no one cruelly pays "use tax", and so was able to sell things much cheaper than brick and mortar stores; and then when people tried to "fix" sales tax (still a broken concept) by charging Amazon in as many situations as they could, Amazon pushed back hard until they could see the two major brick and mortar book companies failing, and then said they would comply but only if they could have one more tax free year. Like, I certainly remember people I knew even say out loud they were buying books on Amazon due to the lack of sales tax, but it could be that they just didn't know that there was some other thing about "democratizing writing" that was causing their experience to be cheaper somehow.
> You could have made the same argument about Standard Oil - until the competition were crushed and prices went up. Prices didn't go up until the government forced Standard Oil to break up. It had nothing to do with the competition being "crushed"; it had to do with the government taking the attitude you mention, that lower consumer prices didn't matter. Which seems daft since lower consumer prices mean consumers, i.…
> Which seems daft since lower consumer prices mean consumers, i.e., the people, are better off. I don't think that necessarily follows; price is big, but not everything. I don't care how cheap products are on Amazon, I still refuse to buy computer storage or anything that goes in the human body since they are either unwilling or unable to deal with counterfeiting problem.
> I don't care how cheap products are on Amazon, I still refuse to buy computer storage or anything that goes in the human body since they are either unwilling or unable to deal with counterfeiting problem.
Standard Oil didn't have a "counterfeiting problem", so I don't see how this is relevant to them. Or, for that matter, to any other large monopoly that has been broken up by antitrust action.
Also, you as a consumer might judge that, for example, you don't trust Amazon to deliver the product you want in a certain area, regardless of how low the price is. That's fine. But that in itself is no argument for breaking up Amazon in an antitrust action. It's just an argument for not trusting Amazon for certain types of products.
> here the monopoly leads to more innovation More innovation in what? And as compared to what? The innovations you mention are all addressing issues that only huge tech giants like Google have anyway. And they are all funded by the ad-supported business model, which IMO is a negative that outweighs those positive contributions. Plus, the ad supported business model means users only get the benefit of any innovations…
> If this hypothesis were correct, we would have expected to see lawsuits against those other monopolies during, say, the Obama administration. But we didn't. This presupposes that the DoJ has always been a political weapon.
> This presupposes that the DoJ has always been a political weapon.
No, it only presupposes that if the DoJ is going to be used as a political weapon, any administration, of either party, is about equally as likely to use it as any other. Given the general track record of the Federal government, this seems like a much more plausible assumption than your implicit assumption that it only started being a political weapon just now.