Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

ftc.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 930 posts

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#231

Post by bluGill »

babypuncher wrote: post #149
hightrix wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I prefer Amazon Basics to YAYWOWND brand every day. It is one of the few brands on Amazon you can count on to not be Chinese crap. Even if it is made in China, the Amazon Basics products are generally good quality.

That is another problem with Amazon. It seems like my only options are Amazon Basics, or weird 3-day old Chinese brand. Where are all the actually reputable brands hiding?

Many reputable brands are not on Amazon because then they people who buy from them are not getting a counterfeit. You have to be a certain size to pull this off though, small companies have trouble getting a market outside of amazon or ebay.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#232

Post by kmeisthax »

abduhl wrote: post #161
cratermoon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not if you cannot prove that the price that the customer pays is now higher. That's according to a peculiar interpretation of anti-trust law. “Due to a change in legal thinking and practice in the 1970s and 1980s, antitrust law now assesses competition largely with an eye to the short-term interests of consumers, not producers or the health of the market as a whole; antitrust doctrine views low consumer price…

It’s strange to call the most prominent view (and the one applied by courts currently) a “peculiar” interpretation. Lina Khan is the one with the “peculiar” view right now. The consumer interest test is preferred because, among other reasons, it is quantitative. Quantitative tests are seen as less able to be abused because some judge has a particular view/vibe. Additionally, the consumer harm test focuses on the cons…

It is peculiar because it was legislated from the bench. Congress made it very clear at the time the legislation was drafted, multiple times, that they considered concentrated markets to be, in effect, a parallel state. Every captain of industry today would become a tyrant tomorrow, if given the power. Textualists and originalists should have smacked down consumer welfare the moment it was proposed.

> Additionally, the consumer harm test focuses on the consumer which is the ultimate class of people antitrust laws seek to protect. Antitrust laws don’t exist to protect markets, they exist to protect citizens.

Citizens stop being consumers when they exit the store. Then they go to work or run their business, whereupon Amazon harms them to the tune of thousands of dollars - all so they can save a penny when they put that "consumer" hat back on. This is ludicrous and self-defeating.

> Quantitative tests are seen as less able to be abused because some judge has a particular view/vibe

Of course, the choice of which quantitative test to use is totally objective too, right? /s

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#233

Post by [deleted] »

crznp wrote: post #163
likpok wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ATT, where apple hobbled other ad networks running on iOS. It used to be that DTC companies could use the fine-grained targeting offered by FB and Google to reach consumers without needing to go through a major distributor. Since the targeting is much less effective it's more expensive (potentially uneconomically so) to reach people. As a result, sellers are forced back to Amazon.

Lots of TLAs: ATT: Apple's App Tracking Transparency, not AT&T FBA: Fulfillment by Amazon, not related to FB DTC: Direct To Consumer, not Depository Trust Company

[deleted]

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#234

Post by taeric »

libraryatnight wrote: post #36
charcircuit wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you buy a PS5 game you can only play it on the PS5 and they don't remove DRM after the came goes into public domain.

You can't think of a few reasons this is not a great comparison? Like, base expectations to begin with would disqualify this analogy as useful.

My kids have been confused on why I have to buy separate copies of many indie games for both Steam and Playstation and/or Switch. And... it actually is rather obnoxious.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#235

Post by plagiarist »

unregistereddev wrote: post #186
loeg wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Albertsons + Kroger is like 90% of the market in Seattle, where I live, though.

It's very location-dependent. In my midwest metro I believe they'd be less than 5% of the market. I'm sure Albertsons and Kroger each have local monopolies in different regions.

I think they have a good point, though. I would like the laws to prevent a single corporation from being 90% of all groceries for an entire state even if they aren't anything close to a monopoly from a national perspective.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#236

Post by arielcostas »

dartos wrote: post #102
taeric wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sony almost certainly has more marketshare of the console market than Amazon does of anything. The numbers that came out for sales of XBox were... sobering for how badly Microsoft is throwing cash to stay in the game.

So with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo: Sony has about 50% market share and Microsoft and Nintendo have about 25. That’s a very different (I’d argue healthier) world than online retailers where Amazon has like 36% but the next largest (Walmart) is like 6%. You need to weigh the market share against the number of players in the space. Also that’s not to mention how all 3 major game console players have some kind of moat…

And even in consoles, you have the option of never buying one: you can play videogames on PC, on a tablet or on a mobile phone. And now you even have the cloud option with NVIDIA or MS' Game Pass Ultimate.

With Amazon however, it's more complicated since they control so many businesses. Visiting a website? Very probably it's hosted on AWS, or on a platform that runs on AWS. Visiting a friend with a smart doorbell thingy? Quite probably an Amazon Ring. Want to buy an e-book to read? Sell your soul to either Apple, Google or Amazon, or other smaller platforms (or pirate the book or buy it physically).

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#237

Post by sailfast »

losteric wrote: post #168
likpok wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble with this argument (which gets made a lot) is that this is basically every large retailer. Walmart has great value, Safeway has safeway select, Target has good and gather. In all of these cases large retailers take well-performing products (i.e. look at their sales data to see what is selling well) and creates mimics. They put the generics right next to the original products, and then charge the original…

> The trouble with this argument (which gets made a lot) is that this is basically every large retailer. Alternatively: there's no trouble at all, Walmart/Safeway/etc are all clearly engaging in this anti-competitive practice and must be reigned in. Marketplaces need to be regulated as neutral grounds for sellers, the marketplace cannot double-dip and compete against sellers or engage in practices that reduce competi…

Aren't most of these generics all white-label anyway? I'm less worried about store-brand generics that are often outsourced, and more worried about behavior that drives any of the original manufacturers out of the business entirely because of monopoly over the entire sales chain.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#238

Post by kmeisthax »

akira2501 wrote: post #30
zht wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that many people will spend a lot of time and energy defending large companies (and often their CEOs) against perceived bullying. Amazon, Tesla, Elon, Meta, etc etc. I don't really understand it.

There's the old line about "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." I feel like Hacker News types see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed monopolists."

HN is run by a VC firm, and the explicit goal of the companies they fund is to grow very big very quickly. While HN's audience extends beyond that the VCs do leave behind a huge imprint.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#239

Post by atlasunshrugged »

dragonwriter wrote: post #200
atlasunshrugged wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree but IANAL. Doesn't the fact that the FTC recently filed a case against a PE firm buying up anesthesia clinics and using that to jack up prices run counter to the example of the cost of housing? Or for contractors gouging the gov, my understanding is that PE firms have rolled up small defense contractors and then used monopoly power to gouge the government. That seems pretty firmly in their jurisd…

> Doesn’t the fact that the FTC recently filed a case against a PE firm buying up anesthesia clinics and using that to jack up prices run counter to the example of the cost of housing? If you can find a single private equity firm doing that to a functionally bounded market to secure a monopoly on, say, rental housing, sure. But that isn’t the complaint I’ve heard about PE effects on housing markets.

Ah, that makes sense, thanks!

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#240

Post by tqi »

runako wrote: post #188

Without engaging the merits of this particular case, I do think there is an interesting takeaway about which companies wield even more power than Amazon (and Big Tech more generally, since Google and Meta are also discussed as likely targets of similar suits). Notably: health insurers. They're an oligopoly whose revenues total something like 4% of US GDP. They engage in anticompetitive practices, and the end result i…

> Lobbying works. Tech will eventually figure this out.

Tech is well aware of this, and is spending accordingly[1]. However I think politics are a bigger motivating factor, and taking "tech" to task is viewed as a good way to score points (probably helps that legacy media views tech as direct competitors, and covers them accordingly).

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/23/apple-ramped-up-lobbying-spe...

Post reply on HN