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FTC reportedly plans major antitrust lawsuit against Amazon

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Re: FTC reportedly plans major antitrust lawsuit against Amazon

#11

Post by no_wizard »

likpok wrote: post #7

A lot of the beef with Amazon seems to be "welcome to retail". I don't think Walmart even has third-party logistics for its stores -- or if it does it's of the "hire contractors and squeeze them hard" variety. Personally I've found the customer experience of non-FBA merchants on amazon is often pretty bad: long shipping times and weird return policies. This gets at a sort of core problem with this: where is the line…

Amazon can have pro consumer policies (free shipping & returns. Easy return process) without predatory practices though. It would be silly for the FTC to argue that good consumer experience is anti-trust behavior.

What they could argue is about the myriad of ways that Amazon uses its market power to put others out of business or force them to sell (diapers.com comes to mind on this[0]).

[0]: https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-be...

Re: FTC reportedly plans major antitrust lawsuit against Amazon

#13

Post by sergiotapia »

TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #3
treis wrote: post #2

This doesn't seem to be the right tack. There's legitimate reasons to favor sellers that use your own logistics. Hard to see that as anti-competitive. Even harder to see why they picked this issue when there's seemingly many more blatant ones going on.

Not only that, I'm sure most customers PREFER sellers that use Amazon's logistics. I sure do. It's more trustworthy, you know the product exists at an amazon warehouse, faster shipping, etc.

I'm the total opposite. How can I trust Amazon if they aren't the ones selling me the merchandise? 3rd party sellers killed that website entirely for me.

I needed to buy creatine and the last place I would buy it would be Amazon because there are too many chinese counterfeits, and worse Amazon seems to wash their hands of any responsibility. I ultimately bought creatine from nootropicsdepot. I buy things directly from the manufacturer now or physically from Target.

Re: FTC reportedly plans major antitrust lawsuit against Amazon

#14

Post by tootie »

treis wrote: post #2

This doesn't seem to be the right tack. There's legitimate reasons to favor sellers that use your own logistics. Hard to see that as anti-competitive. Even harder to see why they picked this issue when there's seemingly many more blatant ones going on.

I think her strategy is pretty plausible. They're abusing their position. I won't say it's slam dunk monopolism, but we've been on a decades-long trend of looser and looser regulation and I think it's high time the FTC takes a stand to actually tighten a bit. I'm not familiar enough with legal statute to say how strong their case will be, but it certainly feels like the kind of the thing they should be doing and I trust Lina Khan to have her ducks in a row. She wouldn't be teeing up a high profile case that doesn't have a high chance of success.

Re: FTC reportedly plans major antitrust lawsuit against Amazon

#15

Post by Seattle3503 »

I hope they go after KDP (Kindle) exclusivity next. Authors put their content on Kindle Unlimited, then have to live with Amazon eating into their profit share. Amazon also has no problems rolling over entire subgenres with algorithmic tweaks, destroying them.

Re: FTC reportedly plans major antitrust lawsuit against Amazon

#17

Post by dragonwriter »

treis wrote: post #2

This doesn't seem to be the right tack. There's legitimate reasons to favor sellers that use your own logistics. Hard to see that as anti-competitive. Even harder to see why they picked this issue when there's seemingly many more blatant ones going on.

> There’s legitimate reasons to favor sellers that use your own logistics. Hard to see that as anti-competitive.

Whether or not there are also “legitimate reasons”, its not hard at all to see favoritism on a platform with market dominance conditioned on use of another service as leveraging dominance in one market to gain control of another.

Re: FTC reportedly plans major antitrust lawsuit against Amazon

#18

Post by jroseattle »

Has the FTC outlined what Amazon is actually doing in "rewarding" or "penalizing" 3p merchants? I see a reference to Amazon's "algorithm". Hazarding a guess, it would have to be either category listings or search results? Is there something else?

If so, this is some weak-sauce when it comes to anti-competitive behavior.

Re: FTC reportedly plans major antitrust lawsuit against Amazon

#19

Post by mywittyname »

likpok wrote: post #7

A lot of the beef with Amazon seems to be "welcome to retail". I don't think Walmart even has third-party logistics for its stores -- or if it does it's of the "hire contractors and squeeze them hard" variety. Personally I've found the customer experience of non-FBA merchants on amazon is often pretty bad: long shipping times and weird return policies. This gets at a sort of core problem with this: where is the line…

Amazon's retail arm isn't the grounds of anti-trust action.

Their ownership of AWS, Twitch, MGM, Gaming studios, windfarms, lenders are problems. If they want to be an retail giant, that's fine, but they shouldn't be producing and selling games & movies as well. They need to pick a lane and spin off unrelated entities that only exist because of Amazon's dominance in retail.

Their expansion into all of these market segments make sense in isolation. Amazon builds a better service internally, then begins to offer it for sale to others. But at some point, they've crossed over into abusing their monopoly in one area to expand into another.

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