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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

#361

Post by AnthonyMouse »

lacker wrote: post #227
_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.

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.

> The simplest pro-Amazon case is that they do not have monopoly power, because they are not a monopoly.

It's also odd that their retail business doesn't make any money if they're supposed to have market power.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#362

Post by nwiswell »

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…

I can't help but think that Amazon should be replaced with a non-profit or regulated public utility that provides a single unified online marketplace, part of internet infrastructure like ICANN. Sellers would select among competing fulfillment services (warehouse+shipping). Platform referral fees would go toward customer remediation, anti-counterfeiting, and review integrity.

I don't merely say this as a "fuck Amazon" reflex or a "fuck capitalism" reflex. I say it because it obviously would allow so much of the dying segment of mom and pop small business to become viable again. Just from a policy perspective it's a home run because it's a way to juice GDP, improve consumer purchasing power, AND reduce income inequality.

As a matter of fact I would suggest that Amazon as it exists is anti-capitalist. It is feudal. Capitalism is the deployment of capital and assumption of risk in pursuit of new value creating activity. Amazon is not marshalling new capital to innovate or improve its digital marketplace. Rather, Amazon simply owns digital real estate and extracts rent, like some kind of futuristic dystopian corpo-baron.

The best part of all this is that Amazon doesn't have to be forcibly nationalized or broken up or anything like that. The government just needs to support and endorse a good alternative, because Amazon seriously sucks.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#363

Post by symlinkk »

dragonwriter wrote: post #254
pseudosavant wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the sentiment behind this reaction that most people have. I just have a hard time understanding how it is any different than brick and mortar companies using their sales data to determine which products they should have a store brand version of. Costco, Walmart, Target, etc. all do this, and have been doing it for decades. At a Costco, they'll often stop selling the brand name product if they introduce a "Kirkl…

> I just have a hard time understanding how it is any different than brick and mortar companies using their sales data to determine which products they should have a store brand version of. Costco, Walmart, Target, etc. all do this, and have been doing it for decades. The legal difference underlying the lawsuit between this behavior by Amazon and the behavior you raise by those stores is not the behavior, but its con…

Amazon does not have a monopoly on online shopping that’s absurd. Chewy, Wayfair, Target, Walmart, AliExpress all are huge competitors.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#364

Post by jstarfish »

mindslight wrote: post #213
jstarfish wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because these companies and CEOs have a lot of resources should not automatically kick in the "David v Goliath" instinct that most people have David vs. Goliath was a story about overcoming subjugation and oppression. A lot of people have been very much put-upon by the metaphorical Goliath here in a number of ways. There are piss bottles available as evidence.

I'm amazed at how much the idea of pissing into a bottle offended the sensibilities of journalists. Given a choice between pissing in bottles or having the time saved as a longer lunch break, I'd guess most would chose the lunch break. The never ending screw turning cost optimization is the problem, but using that example lands really flat.

> The never ending screw turning cost optimization is the problem, but using that example lands really flat.

I worked in logistics (elsewhere) for a decade, and quit when conditions shifted to incentivize smoking meth and pissing in jugs. It's abusive and just fucking gross.

I assume you aren't pissing in jugs to save time for longer lunch breaks. Why not?

Nobody pisses in jugs unless they're forced to. The example only falls flat because Bezos escaped the gravity well in his dick-rocket and it's really fucking hard to hurl bottles of piss into space with a sling.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#365

Post by barryrandall »

karaterobot wrote: post #215
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…

I had to look this up, so for other ignoramuses like me: FBA is Fulfillment by Amazon, where you sell things on Amazon and they handle payments and shipping to customers.

And the vast majority of the products are just rebrands from Alibaba. As a matter of fact, there's an entire economy centered around finding products on Alibaba to resell on Amazon.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#366

Post by reagan83 »

reagan83 wrote: post #134
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…

Great insight overall - can you describe more on the FB/IG/TT to Shopify connection not working or now dead?

Context on my question: I run one of the that works on this connector at IG - email me rbw at fb.com I’d be happy to connect and filter this feedback.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#367

Post by _jal »

babypuncher wrote: post #329
kmeisthax wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the old machinery for small businesses to find their customers - e.g. news, hobbyist magazines, etc - is no longer around, and so there's nothing for those businesses to return to. The Internet, and specifically advertising companies, killed them off. What's unfair is not that they can't violate privacy, but that Amazon still can.

Is Amazon somehow exempt from the App Store's privacy rules?

Amazon has its own enormous scale, it doesn't need Apple's complicity.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#368

Post by wolverine876 »

max_ wrote: post #276
rattlesnakedave wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a consumer, this doesn't really hurt me. I get good products for cheap delivered in two days or less. I don't see how the FTC is helping me here.

Exactly, the purpose of capitalism is to serve the consumer not the competitors.

The purpose is to serve the public, full stop (including consumers, employees, shareholders, other citizens). The mechanism is the free market, not capitalism, and the free market requires free competition.

Capitalism is one tool in the free market toolbox, and it works very well in many ways. One way this tool doesn't work well is that it leads to monopolies, which stifle competition, which hurts the people listed above.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#369

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

Sue them in small claims court. It's perfect for this, you just bring in your documentation and write up a timeline for the judge.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#370

Post by jessriedel »

sschueller wrote: post #130
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…

They straight up copied products in their store an then listed theirs higher in search results. There was a famous instance of a bag. You can't be more monopolistic than that. They also got insight into every states future plans (which are secret for some reason ) when they offered to build new HQs but then decided not too. This gives them a huge advantage over anyone else who wants to setup a nation wide logistics s…

> They straight up copied products in their store an then listed theirs higher in search results. There was a famous instance of a bag. You can't be more monopolistic than that.

Almost every major grocery store and convenience store chain does this. These are the store’s generic brands, they are specifically designed to be copies of the name brand, and they are positioned more favorably on the shelves. (They often say “compare to [name brand]”.) In general, this is highly beneficial to competition and the consumer.

If you want to make an argument that Amazon’s high market share makes this strategy damaging when it would otherwise be good, then sure go ahead and do that. But the argument needs to be specific and quantitative.

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