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Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

politico.eu

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Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#71

Post by andrepd »

smhost wrote: post #62
nerbert wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon the marketplace isn’t terribly innovative. It’s a marketplace supported by fantastic logistics, and most of it is backed by USPS anyways. There’s only so much you can do to remove the pains from buyers, sounds like we’re there.

"Innovation" refers to practices like staying in the red for a decade and bypassing antitrust laws by owning (rather than monopolizing) markets. It has little to do with technological innovation.

Precisely. Much of the "innovations" and "efficiencies" touted (by Amazon and by many other players) are actually not any material/physical/technical improvements, but financial games, buying competitors, operating at a loss, regulatory evasion, monopolisation, etc.

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#72

Post by varispeed »

Amazon should be split into separate independent companies - logistics, AWS, marketplace and whatever else they do now. We need laws that will limit growth of companies to become too big to fail and have all the money to buy laws, destroy competition and in general do as they please without consequences. It's a loophole in capitalism that has to be closed. Big businesses should follow the same rules as your mom and pops company. If small business often pay over 40% in various taxes, the same level of taxes should apply to big companies. Nice start would be looking into avoidance schemes big companies use and make them pay all they have avoided over the years. Use that money to lower the tax for small business and continue until the playing field is level.

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#73

Post by batty_alex »

rualca wrote: post #18
amelius wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stallman said it too: https://stallman.org/amazon.html > We should not allow a company to have a share over around 10% of any market. If in a certain field a single dominant company is beneficial for society, that means it is a natural monopoly, and should be served by a regulated utility.

> We should not allow a company to have a share over around 10% of any market. If a company was already at said 10% limit and you wanted to buy something out of them because to you their offer is by far so much better than any of the alternatives, in your opinion what should happen?

It's not a math equation you run through a computer and get a legal result out the other end. Congress (or whatever) could use this measurement as a tool to drive investigations so you can stomp out anti-competitive behavior before it becomes a problem

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#74

Post by nova22033 »

mk89 wrote: post #21

Well, it's something that is slowly backfiring. It's under the eyes of everyone, and not enforcing such policy will only make it even worse for Amazon itself that eventually will end up selling only non-branded products. Finally it will be only another e-commerce like "ebay" used to be, and something else will replace it. Just enjoy the ride until you can. PS: speaking out of experience, I had one time a talk to a di…

chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS

The article says someone used data from Amazon(the online store), not AWS. You should absolutely use Azure(or GCP) if it makes more economic sense for you but migrating from AWS to Azure because of this may be an overreaction.

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#75

Post by andrepd »

pc86 wrote: post #60
alfonsodev wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price would regulate itself by offer/demand balance and you would still be able to buy it if you can afford it. With no limits, they can actually create artificial lower prices that competition can’t match, and they become exponentially more powerful and dominating. And sometimes you end up as a customer having less options and lower quality.

Price dumping is already illegal.

Explain Uber then :^)

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#76

Post by pessimizer »

ekianjo wrote: post #53
amelius wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stallman said it too: https://stallman.org/amazon.html > We should not allow a company to have a share over around 10% of any market. If in a certain field a single dominant company is beneficial for society, that means it is a natural monopoly, and should be served by a regulated utility.

RMS is right about many things but not this one. Competition naturally leads to few companies capturing a market over a long period of time. What's however important is to prevent actively regulatory capture of said markets.

That's going to be impossible if alienating one or two companies can ruin your career in the industry. And that's aside from the fact that regulators will mostly be recruited from those couple of companies, looking for jobs with those companies when they leave, and starting consulting firms and lobbying firms that will be contracting with those couple of companies. Those companies will also have Congress's ear when regulation is discussed because they are donating so much. They are the experts.

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#77

Post by nova22033 »

ahiknsr wrote: post #57
mk89 wrote: post #21

Well, it's something that is slowly backfiring. It's under the eyes of everyone, and not enforcing such policy will only make it even worse for Amazon itself that eventually will end up selling only non-branded products. Finally it will be only another e-commerce like "ebay" used to be, and something else will replace it. Just enjoy the ride until you can. PS: speaking out of experience, I had one time a talk to a di…

> I had one time a talk to a director from an important online shop (top 3 in the country in that specific field) and "this sort of things" was exactly the reason why they chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS. Imagine how deep it can go This seems to be very common. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/07/18/walmart-ci...

Amazon is a direct competitor so it makes sense for Walmart to not give them more money via AWS.

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#78

Post by ceejayoz »

fighterpilot wrote: post #66
ceejayoz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For one, large government software projects are almost always disastrous, even in developed countries. The same tends to be true for large corporate software projects. As a fairly recent example: https://www.theregister.com/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_lawsu...

Right, but there's a self-correction here, which is that Accenture gets fired if they do a bad job. The govt has a monopoly and so there's little self-correction - too many layers of indirection between the everyday voter and Amazon's outcome.

Governments get fired fairly regularly.

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#79

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

suprfsat wrote: post #44
LightG wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a catch-22 ... would Amazon be this innovative had it been nationalised? At what point do you nationalise? Is there a next technology which will be stifled if it was nationalise? Does nationalisation sttifle innovation? I've been wrestling with these questions as I actually don't like Amazon for all the reasons that have been well publicised ... but their customer service is excellent. Which sets me against a st…

Jeff Bezos will testify in front of congress that he will cease to be innovative if required to pay taxes.

Sounds like extortion to me.

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#80

Post by mschuster91 »

nerbert wrote: post #52
LightG wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a catch-22 ... would Amazon be this innovative had it been nationalised? At what point do you nationalise? Is there a next technology which will be stifled if it was nationalise? Does nationalisation sttifle innovation? I've been wrestling with these questions as I actually don't like Amazon for all the reasons that have been well publicised ... but their customer service is excellent. Which sets me against a st…

Amazon the marketplace isn’t terribly innovative. It’s a marketplace supported by fantastic logistics, and most of it is backed by USPS anyways. There’s only so much you can do to remove the pains from buyers, sounds like we’re there.

> It’s a marketplace supported by fantastic logistics, and most of it is backed by USPS anyways.

Not any more, USPS was only used for shipping anyway.

Amazon has shifted to vertical integration wherever they can - they run everything they can, from air freight (with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Air) over their infamous warehouses to last-mile delivery with either in-house staff or "contractor" schemes set up to avoid labor regulations.

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