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FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

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Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#301

Post by vagabund »

reilly3000 wrote: post #119

Even if this action turns out to be toothless, it should still go a long way to shape public perception. I cancelled Prime 3 years ago and really haven’t looked back. I simply shop elsewhere, and between Target and eBay I don’t miss a thing. The Echos got unplugged, the AWS certs didn’t get renewed, their music service got canceled. I am all out and I hope others will do the same. For me this was driven by their anti…

I don't know, your easy access to alternatives that've let you not "look back" kind of undermines the argument that they wield monopolist power, doesn't it? And should FTC suits really be vehicles for shaping public perception, even if, as you suggest, the claims are either not defensible or don't constitute violations?

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#302

Post by fallingknife »

_uhtu wrote: post #3

I'm honestly not sure how you could make the case that they aren't maintaining and abusing monopoly power. I mean they literally blatantly copy the designs of other companies who sell on amazon, then put their own results for their own products higher in search results than what they copied off of. It's incredibly blatantly anti-competitive.

Grocery stores do this all the time and undercut brand names. They even put up signs with "compare to " by the generic. I'm really not sure how you could make the case that it isn't legal given that it is a long standing and accepted practice, and is clearly beneficial to the consumer.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#303

Post by taeric »

criddell wrote: post #280
taeric wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... not wrong. But useful? Does this happen with any technology? Is it being blocked by practices from Amazon? Still feels like a non-sequitur.

DVDs could be purchased and played on any player. Most of the non-Amazon ebook world uses Adobe DRM.

As someone that was into DVDs from other regions, this comment is laughably wrong.

Edit: Heck, just playing movies on my computer DVD drives was less than straight forward. For the longest time you basically had to feel like a hacker to get it working on a linux machine.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#304

Post by turquoisevar »

fsckboy wrote: post #145
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.

was there also any change related to Apple wanting a cut of anything sold through an app, and how the Amazon shopping app works on iOS, and could that also affect 3rd parties?

No, physical goods have always been excluded from Apple’s commission

In fact they explicitly prohibit using in-app purchases for physical goods, presumably because they don’t want to deal with the headache that comes with providing customer support for those transactions.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#305

Post by brianstorms »

bombcar wrote: post #293
brianstorms wrote: post #287

I signed up as a Seller on Amazon a while back, with one primary goal: sell extra copies of my book, published by Pantheon Books in 2017. The publisher offered me boxes of them at dirt-cheap prices and I took them up on their offer. So I started selling on Amazon, and I set my price as the lowest possible for "New" condition hardcover. For a while my price got listed on the main book product page. Only briefly though…

You haven't even begun to enter the world of unscrupulous activity, and Amazon is mostly 'hands off' because they don't care - but other 3rd party sellers DO and they know all the tricks about how to pump alternative sellers off the page, etc. The whole thing is a worthless Alibaba ripoff now.

Do you think some other seller falsely "reported" me, claiming my copies my be counterfeit, for surely there was no way I could offer them so cheaply to beat out the next cheapest seller by, what, 50 cents?

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#306

Post by crazygringo »

rat9988 wrote: post #285
lacker wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the best statistics I can find, in the US, Amazon has 37.8 percent of the retail e-commerce market. https://www.statista.com/statistics/274255/market-share-of-t... The simplest pro-Amazon case is that they do not have monopoly power, because they are not a monopoly.

As a seller who wants to sell retail, what is the marketshare of available platforms?

It really depends on how you define it, but Amazon, Walmart and Shopify are all excellent mainstream choices. This gives you plenty of numbers for comparison:

https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/amazon-walmart-s...

Then obviously you're also got direct-to-consumer via your own website, and lots of niche channels like Etsy, Wayfair, and so forth.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#307

Post by stale2002 »

binarymax wrote: post #164
lvl102 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I am saying what Amazon is doing is not anticompetitive at all. These “companies” that sell on Amazon are basically glorified trade companies that arbitrage low cost Chinese manufacturing. I don’t feel bad for them at all. If they are hurting so bad, go sell the goods on Shopify store or Walmart/Target. Oh, what’s that? They charge more than Amazon? Interesting…

You're over generalizing. There are plenty of sellers that took the time to develop their own products and sell them, only to be copied and undercut by Amazon.

That is literally the opposite of anti-competitive.

That is the definition of a pro competitive behavior.

Lower prices for consumers is the whole point of a competitive market!

Yes, big companies can compete in the market, by offer better quality stuff, for a lower price. Thats what we want!

You are literally arguing in favor* of monopolies, and against competition by saying that other companies shouldn't do a better job.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#308

Post by lukeinator42 »

lvl102 wrote: post #114

Out of all the natural tech monopolies, Amazon is the ONLY one that did the opposite of exercising market power. They actually brought fast shipping to the market. A decade ago, you had to pay a crap ton of money to ship things even two days. They forced the incumbents such as Walmart to change. They’re constantly improving e-commerce. Heck they even opened up aws and created an entire industry. Amazon did more to re…

Along with this, I don't understand how the part of the lawsuit that says "Conditioning sellers’ ability to obtain 'Prime' eligibility for their products—a virtual necessity for doing business on Amazon—on sellers using Amazon’s costly fulfillment service"

is solely an anti-competitive tactic, because how else would Amazon guarantee the fast shipping, etc. if they aren't in control of the fulfilment? I thought prime is only possible through amazon distributing third party products to their warehouses all over so that the shipping can be so fast.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#309

Post by thomastjeffery »

taeric wrote: post #166
thomastjeffery wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An agreement is constructed by two parties, not one.

Feels like a non-sequitur? What are you trying to say? My specific point is that I would wager money that Amazon being required to have DRM on their devices is required by publishers for them to be able to have that publisher's offerings. If Amazon drops the DRM, they lose the ability to offer that content. I'm not as confident that they have the agreement include that they will not offer authors a way to have DRM fr…

If Amazon refused to enter that agreement, would the publisher simply refuse to sell ebooks on Amazon? I sincerely doubt that.

If Amazon was actually motivated to refuse DRM, then we would be in an entirely different situation. The reality is that the opposite is true, and that Amazon itself is one of the publishers requiring DRM!

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#310

Post by pixl97 »

dtjb wrote: post #217
binarymax wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're over generalizing. There are plenty of sellers that took the time to develop their own products and sell them, only to be copied and undercut by Amazon.

How is that different from Walmart selling their Great Value store brand? They see what products sell well then formulate their own cheaper alternative, maybe even giving their product better shelf placement. Every national grocer does this. It seems to be a pretty close analog yet nobody bats an eye at the practice.

In general there are many different grocery stores, even Walmart the massive company it is only represents something like 10% of grocery sales in the US.

Amazon represents something like 40% of all online sales. Typically having a large plurality in a market raises the likelihood of actions against you.

>It seems to be a pretty close analog yet nobody bats an eye at the practice.

Or, more likely, tech people pay attention to Amazon and not the myriad of suits occuring in the retail and grocery world.

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