21–30 of 116 posts
With Temu coming from China to compete with Amazon, and the US regulators going full anti-China recently, I'm really interested to see whether these actions against Amazon get pushback from the top of government, and ultimately get stalled.
We should regulate Amazon, and we cannot regulate Temu, we ban it.
With Temu coming from China to compete with Amazon, and the US regulators going full anti-China recently, I'm really interested to see whether these actions against Amazon get pushback from the top of government, and ultimately get stalled.
I hope not. I am so tired of "but if you don't let us be evil, China will" as a justification to allow tech monopolies to operate unchecked. We should regulate Amazon, and we cannot regulate Temu, we ban it.
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 se…
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.
It's not exculpating for a burglar to claim that a burglary was a really good choice for them at the time.
edit:
> There's legitimate reasons to favor sellers that use your own logistics. Hard to see that as anti-competitive.
These sentences bother me so much. The argument is about what is or is not legitimate, and you're not making an case, you're just giving a verdict. Why is it hard to see?
I'm actually not convinced this is going to go very well. The FTC for the last few years has talked a big game, and hired people who have talked a big game; but the actual lawsuits have been pretty mediocre and occasionally even poorly thought through. An example lately is their battle with Microsoft to block the ActiVision acquisition which, the general consensus of observers seems to be, isn't going very well and t…
I think this is probably wise even if they don't win much:
1) it'll set the boundaries of how courts interpret the current laws, which will inform if there are unpopular holes that could become part of political platforms going forward
2) it'll add that much uncertainty and "cost of doing business" legal expense to companies playing fast and loose in other novel ways because they've known they're unlikely to get challenged
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'm actually not convinced this is going to go very well. The FTC for the last few years has talked a big game, and hired people who have talked a big game; but the actual lawsuits have been pretty mediocre and occasionally even poorly thought through. An example lately is their battle with Microsoft to block the ActiVision acquisition which, the general consensus of observers seems to be, isn't going very well and t…
The only real question right now is if the judge whose son quite literally works for Microsoft (!!) will decide that laws don't matter, which has been the main issue with antitrust enforcement in the recent past.