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FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

ftc.gov

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Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#331

Post by burkaman »

mindslight wrote: post #256
burkaman wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anybody need to make that choice?

Why do people have to make choices of how to spend their time? Because there is a finite amount of time in any given period, and most activities are mutually exclusive.

No, why are they forced to make this specific choice? Why would they need to deduct time from their lunch break in order to use the bathroom? Using the bathroom and eating lunch are not normally mutually exclusive activities, unless there is a third party enforcing such an exclusion.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#332

Post by [deleted] »

pcurve wrote: post #171
jollofricepeas wrote: post #52

FBA seller here. A lot of mom and pop businesses (~$20 million) have been built on Amazon over the past 10 years. Most of us are in the $250k to $5 million dollar range. The impact of Amazon’s monopoly power is felt big time by us as we’re being squeezed with no place left to go online especially post-iOS change. Our second option used to be the Facebook/Instagram/TikTok to Shopify connection but with that being dead…

wow... that BB article makes me sad. https://archive.ph/yw3Bv In 2016, they collected 35.2%. In 2022, they collected 51.8% in fee. That's insane.

[deleted]

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#334

Post by m463 »

my123 wrote: post #37
criddell wrote: post #5

I wish they would add ebook DRM to the list. Amazon has essentially locked the Kindle so that it can only purchase from Amazon and Amazon ebooks can only be used on the Kindle. On top of that, they offer no way of transferring ebooks and, AFAIK, offer no way to remove DRM after a work enters the public domain.

(disclaimer: Amazon employee) For that one, it's mandated by publishers. There's nothing that can be done for e-readers from vendors that don't support third-party applications. Amazon e-books are accessible on Android and other platforms in addition to Kindle devices. Kindle is also not locked to only ebooks from Amazon, but third-party DRM schemes are not supported. Calibre for example comes with good tooling for t…

What I can't figure out is that many books (such as Tor) have a notice:

  At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without
  Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Are these encrypted anyway on kindle?

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#335

Post by smallnix »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #328
steveBK123 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran a small FBA business for a year nowhere near any scale and it was an interesting lesson. People who weigh in on these tech topics should actually try these things out to understand them better. It's nothing like listing on eBay where there's some haircut off the top and that's that. There are fees for - accepting inventory, holding inventory, returning unsold inventory, shipping sales, processing returns, destr…

AWS works this way too but I’ll get dogpiled by Amazon sycophants and other people who have built their careers around getting witless companies sucked into the Amazon machine.

Steve gave examples for the different kind of fees and that it's hard to track them and why. I wanted to ask you for examples for AWS. Would be good to know concrete pitfalls and traps.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#337

Post by tehlike »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #173
tehlike wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably true. But then feels like it's one or two tweaks away.

It might be, but Costco has a reputation for integrity, and it's not worth trading that for a few percent cost savings on generic items that aren't even a big portion of their bottom line.

I meant for amazon.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#338

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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…

> They were pissed I had a super-low price... they swept in and shut me down, with some kind of made-up lie about COUNTERFEIT

If true, we have a name for this, its called fraud. Little people like you and me go to prison for it.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#339

Post by sib »

dragonwriter wrote: post #80
sib wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nor is Amazon

The complaint [0] has 32 pages detailing Amazon's durable monopoly power in two relevant markets, so your claim that it lacks a monopoly might do with somewhat more of a counterargument than you've presented. [0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.32...

"Monopoly: the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service."

Given that there are things such as Walmart.com, eBay, Shopify, and many hundreds of other online commerce stores, they are self-evidently not a monopoly. In fact, they don't even have a majority share of eCommerce in the US.

And they also don't have majority share in cloud services.

Nor do they have a monopoly in eBooks.

I did not say they don't have monopoly power, I said, they are not a monopoly.

(Other than obvious things such as "Amazon products"..., in which case every manufacturer or retailer is a monopoly in their own products.)

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#340

Post by jrockway »

tornato7 wrote: post #271
hotnfresh wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What especially rankles is how Amazon doesn’t give a fuck about counterfeits. So they’re allowing counterfeits (amplifying the mentioned effect) to discourage direct-sellers from attempting to compete on price. Meanwhile, I have to order from direct sellers to be sure I will get a genuine, new product. So I don’t even get Amazon’s lower-but-still-higher-than-optimal price, but a yet higher one. As far as I’m concerne…

Not just counterfeits but pages upon pages of shitty products from companies like WOWZAMGO and PARTUE that, now that they have sponsored rankings, will always come up first in search. They also all have endless fake reviews. This renders Amazon's search essentially useless.

I don't really have a problem with this stuff. It's memeable (some great photoshop artists there; always good when the company has no photo of their actual product) and not that cheap, but I think of Amazon as an overpriced Shenzhen market and this stuff is essential to maintaining that vibe.
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