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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

#411

Post by billy99k »

I was an Amazon seller 10 years ago. I noticed that as soon as I started getting some traction, Amazon would start selling alternatives and undercut me. At some point they started asking for proof of sales. This was then further used to compete against me.

At some point, I had a complaint, refunded the customer completely, and they outright banned my account and held my money for 90 days (I got all of my money back after the 90 days). It completely wiped my business out and I never looked back.

I was banned to the point where if another seller was associated why my account at all, they were also banned. All of my calls went nowhere and I was pushed to automated responses.

12+ years later and I have my seller account back. Not like I'm ever going to sell anything on Amazon again.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#412

Post by thomastjeffery »

hrdwdmrbl wrote: post #375
thomastjeffery wrote: post #146

They only passively mentioned fulfillment. The fact that Amazon owns the market and fulfillment and even last-mile delivery is the most obvious case of vertical integration I have ever heard of, and I personally interact with it in some way at least once every week !

Is vertical integration illegal?

Is monopoly illegal?

That's very nearly the same question.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#413

Post by criddell »

bigbillheck wrote: post #224
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.

Does calibre not work on new kindles?

I assume you are talking about the DeDRM tools? If so, the answer to your question is that it doesn’t work as well as it used to. The era of easily strippable DRM is ending.

Amazon’s latest file format KFX hasn’t been entirely cracked and it’s possible it won’t ever be entirely cracked. The best anybody can do so far is to buy an older Kindle and download it to that in order to get a crackable version. The problem with that is you lose all of the typography improvements only available in KFX.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#414

Post by Nullabillity »

smugma wrote: post #345
m463 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's funny is that I couldn't tell if this was serious or sarcastic at first glance. (caught fire -> sarcastic) Thing is, these silly UPPER-CASE-NONSENSE-COMPANIES are winning against established brands with quality products. Except there is a trend now where a brand with products of known good quality like YETI can now charge outrageous amounts of money - like 10x or more.

It’s hard to find that value niche in the middle. They do exist within categories eg Anker for USB related things.

The Anker that was selling "offline" cameras that phoned home plaintext images? Yeah, no thanks.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#415

Post by hotnfresh »

KyleJune wrote: post #409
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…

You might still be getting products from the same inventory pool in an Amazon warehouse when ordering directly if the company uses Amazon's Multi-Channel Fulfillment offering. They sell on their site, tell Amazon about the sale, then Amazon ships it to the customer. They even offer the option to ship it in unbranded boxes so that customers don't know the order is being fulfilled by Amazon.

Ew, gross. I’m pretty sure the couple companies I order from regularly that also have an Amazon presence don’t do that, since they have direct-order products not listed on Amazon and often include little touches like a bonus sample or handwritten note that you don’t get if you order their stuff on Amazon, but good to know to watch out for that.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#416

Post by no_wizard »

m463 wrote: post #316
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WOWZAMGO makes quality products. I bought their portable usb battery and it only caught fire after the 20th charge cycle. PARTUE, on the other hand… don’t ask!

What's funny is that I couldn't tell if this was serious or sarcastic at first glance. (caught fire -> sarcastic) Thing is, these silly UPPER-CASE-NONSENSE-COMPANIES are winning against established brands with quality products. Except there is a trend now where a brand with products of known good quality like YETI can now charge outrageous amounts of money - like 10x or more.

The truth about consumer buying patterns is most purchases are treated as lowest cost commodity, unless the buyer is aware or the price threshold is high enough[0]. When you don't have subliminal[1] and limited selection pressure (both of which exist in brick and mortar stores), coupled with a UI that makes it pretty easy to discover other brands, and coalesced signals (reviews placement etc), lowest price wins.

[0]: Put another way, if its expensive, it gets more scrutiny by the average consumer (whatever their definition for expensive is). The other circumstance is if they care about the category or are in the slice of shoppers who do quality research, which is less common than you might think, until the cost factor kicks in, usually.

[1]: This is brand awareness, and other related verticals. Effectively, this is what brand and mass marketing is about.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#417

Post by dhimes »

hinkley wrote: post #246
_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.

I ate a lot of popcorn during the Microsoft trials - plural - and the received wisdom from previous generations that was already being forgotten at the time is this bit of torch-passing, which I now impart to you. Anti-trust cases usually only succeed once the court of public opinion has turned against the monopolist. If the public is still in favor or ambivalent, then you will not find the political will to successf…

IIRC Microsoft lost in Europe, not in the US.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#418

Post by kortex »

symlinkk wrote: post #363
dragonwriter wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

We need to move away from the term "monopoly" (which may not literally be a mono) and towards anti-competitive.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#419

Post by jldugger »

_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.

> I'm honestly not sure how you could make the case that they aren't maintaining and abusing monopoly power

Well, the obvious way would be "Amazon is not a monopoly." It's blatantly anti-competitive but hasn't produced a competitor yet. And heck, they didn't even have to buy off the competition from Jet.com, Wal-Mart somehow inexplicably did that for them.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#420

Post by taeric »

criddell wrote: post #408
taeric wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than the current situation with ebooks. You could go into an electronics retailer and choose one of a dozen DVD players then drive across town to video store and buy or rent any DVD and the chances that the two things would work together was very high.

No real disagreement from me, on that general point. Things were certainly more convenient in some older formats.

I'm not clear on the relevance to this particular story. For one, ebook practices are literally not part of this case. For two, the assertion in this branch is that that exists at the demands of publishers.

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