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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

#551

Post by Justsignedup »

duped wrote: post #446
Justsignedup wrote: post #19

remember that time that amazon was bleeding like 5 million a day just to make sure they can destroy diapers.com? by selling diapers at a loss, which was numbers that diapers.com couldn't compete with given that they didn't have another business to rely on, then forced diapers.com to sell to amazon because they had no other option? And this came out last time they were doing monopolistic inquiries against amazon. Yet.…

The current FTC chair wrote the ~~book~~ essay on Amazon's monopolistic business practices (1) and has spoken so much about it that the only reason we'd see the government take their foot off the gas here is if Amazon's lawyers can claim that her previous advocacy biases the case against them. (1) https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

I can only but hope that she can do this, if anyone can I think she can.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#552

Post by danielmarkbruce »

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.

"on the kindle".

They have a web based kindle app. They have apps for android, iphone, pc, mac and probably 10 other things I'm unaware of.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#553

Post by xattt »

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…

> Amazon sucks

I’m not sure but I feel the need for some legislation to force large companies to provide human-to-human contact in the event of a dispute.

Even in the world of Brazil, the 1988 movie, there were humans somewhere in the mix.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#554

Post by HWR_14 »

hrdwdmrbl wrote: post #258
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…

> Our second option used to be the Facebook/Instagram/TikTok to Shopify connection but with that being dead in the water most of us have had to commit 100% to FBA to be able to stay afloat. Can you explain this further?

Meta/TikTok do less spying on customers, so it is harder to target ads to customers on iOS. This is the desired behavior. It means people who want to use targeted ads (called "the FB/IG/TikTok to Shopify connection" by the GP) are not able to.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#555

Post by 8note »

BizarroLand wrote: post #530
highwaylights wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the argument is that drop-shippers aren’t really producing any value. It’s not like they’re putting banners over their product pics saying “hey, you know you can buy this exact same product for like half the price on alibaba if you’re willing to wait a couple more weeks for it right?”. I don’t like Amazon consolidating this much power either but if they can push you out of your business that easily you weren…

Show me a business that Amazon couldn't destroy just for kicks. Also, it's not like you have any choices. If you manufacture your products yourself, you have to fund a massive venture to handle the workload. If you outsource the products, then the companies you pay to manufacture your stuff can easily make knockoffs and then let drop shippers undercut you with inferior versions of your own products. Look at a lot of…

I don't think Amazon could destroy apple or Walmart just for kicks.

Aramco? Air Canada? Samsung? Memory Express? Digikey? McMaster Carr? McDonald's? The Big R? Cantillion? Texas Instruments?

"Show me a business" is quite vague

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#556

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

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?

Apple limited data from being transferred between apps. So you can’t measure whether your ad being clicked in one app resulted in a purchase in another app (aka. a “conversion”). That throws a big wrench into ad pricing, because the sellers want to pay-per-conversion. It hurt companies like Snap, Shopify. Since Amazon owns both the search/discovery and checkout in the same app, this doesn’t affect them.

Also, Apple didn’t limit their own advertisers from measuring conversions. So if you click an ad in Apple News and then buy an app from the App Store they will measure and charge the advertiser for that conversion without ever popping up a scary message saying Apple wants to track you. Go figure.

The companies have worked around these issues by doing stuff like statistical modeling to guess the conversion rate, but this has obvious downsides and makes everything harder, which puts them at a competitive disadvantage vs. vertically-integrated players like Apple and Amazon.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#557

Post by mahastore »

mrraj wrote: post #444
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…

From the Bloomberg article : "Chuck Gregorich, who sells fire pits and outdoor furniture, says turning a profit on Amazon is getting harder. One of his popular fire pits costs $200, of which Amazon takes $112 for its commission, warehouse storage, delivery and advertising. That leaves him with $88 to pay the manufacturer, ship the product in from China and cover his overhead." I have a hard time sympathizing here. Th…

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ftc-ant...

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#558

Post by BizarroLand »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #539
BizarroLand wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is being both the platform and a competitor. They have an inside advantage that no one else on the planet outside of ebay and Alibaba (and its ilk) have. It entrenches them and enriches them unjustly. They make profit off of their competitors and have the option of destroying anyone who rubs them the wrong way without repercussion. The capitalistic market cannot speak on the matter as there is a monoposon…

They started out as the competitor. They have always been that. They opened up their capabilities to competitors. They didn't have to.

They didn't open their capabilities to competitors. That is completely false.

No one who sells on Amazon is a competitor. If you are selling on Amazon you are a customer, and every once in a while, Amazon comes in and starts selling your goods for less than you can because they decided they would make more money without you in the picture.

For a little proof, try to find Ammoon products on Amazon. They used to be everywhere. And the information isn't exactly public but there was a falling out between Ammoon and Amazon and now you can't buy Ammoon products on Amazon, but you can find Lekato and Sumimma and Joyo and Cuvave knock offs of the exact same products, and not long after this happened, Amazon started selling cheap guitar pedals under their Amazon Basics brand.

You may say, sure, whatever, but the primary product Ammoon sold was the cheapest ($35) looper pedal on the market.

Amazon undercut that price (to $26.50) and also booted their closest competitor and biggest customer in the guitar pedal looper segment.

Who would defend that kind of scummy action?

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#559

Post by abduhl »

letsdothisagain wrote: post #512
abduhl wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the problem here? If you don’t have a durable competitive advantage then you’re going to get eaten up. First movers should not get a license to continue to reap a profit in a competitive market absent real innovation, which would come in the form of reputation (trademark) or technology (patent). Drop shippers who can be displaced by Amazon in the way you discuss have neither. They already made a profit on the…

The anti-competitive bit is they have all the sales information that would typically be a trade secret for a company. Go ahead, call up your local 7-11 and ask them what their sales were for the quarter. They'll tell you to fuck off.

But Amazon is the 7-11 (and more)! It is the customer facing part of the business that houses and delivers the beef jerky to the ultimate customer. 7-11 sees that jerky sells, that lots of brands can sell jerky, that consumers don’t seem to care about the brand of jerky as long as it says teriyaki, and so 7-11 now sells 7-11 basics teriyaki jerky.

The FBA middlemen are more like traveling salesmen - they take an order, send it in to HQ, and HQ ships it to the 7-11. They don’t do anything but take orders. They are Tom Smykowski - they take the plans to the engineers!

You’re complaining that the storefront that the goods are sold through has its own sales information. The amount of sales you have through Amazon may be a trade secret, but it is not a trade secret from Amazon.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#560

Post by sadhorse »

afavour wrote: post #499
elzbardico wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Product dumping is not illegal if you have a national newspaper that can be used to target any politician and if you make sure to contribute millions and make sure your employees do the same for the political party in power.

If Bezos were using this Washington Post for this purpose a member of the newsroom would immediately leak it. It would be a career defining story for that journalist. The fact that we’ve heard nothing strongly suggests it isn’t happening.

Career defining? Nobody wants to hire rats that you can't trust.
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