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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

#571

Post by asow92 »

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?

By virtue of everything sold on Amazon being in the Amazon app the rule in question is kind of moot. The ATT privacy rules don't matter to them because they've already got everything they need to know about you from your habits in their app.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#572

Post by danielmarkbruce »

BizarroLand wrote: post #558
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eve…

In an enormous number of cases Amazon both sells products and the same exact product from a different supplier, and they sold the product before opening up the store to others. That's the definition of a competitor.

The fact that they didn't sell every single product on planet earth doesn't mean they aren't a competitor. They are practically in the "easy to manufacture by a third party in china consumer products" market. If a company adds so little value that Amazon's 5th rate people (The best minds at Amazon aren't sitting up at night worrying about the guitar pedal looper market) can beat them, they aren't adding value. And, one single distribution channel (the amazon website) doesn't define a market (with almost zero exceptions, amazon's website not being one).

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#573

Post by danielmarkbruce »

thghtihadanacct wrote: post #570
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Iphone, airpods, ipad, macbook. Google search. Coke. Boeing. Caterpillar. Goldman Sachs. AirBnB. Exxon. AutoDesk. BlackRock. CME. Costco. JP Morgan Chase. Mastercard, Visa, Nike, TSMC and a thousand others. They started out as a retailer, and opened up a bunch of their infrastructure to competitors. The idea that they'd make it easy for competitors using their infrastructure to beat them makes zero sense.

Those are good ones but i was thinking of local stuff like grocery (which they tried and are currently failing) and gas (not that i use it). Also, real services like plumbing, electric, vehicle maint. ... Angies list got that corner ;)

The list is extremely long as you say. Amazon isn't good at much except cheap third party stuff made by contract manufacturers in china, books, and AWS.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#574

Post by asow92 »

babypuncher wrote: post #153
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.

Businesses got along just fine before all that intense user tracking was even possible. If your business absolutely needs it to survive, then your business doesn't deserve to survive. "boo hoo, I can't invade my users privacy anymore! Waaaaah! It's unfair"

You say that, but what this rule has done is made it so this kind of tracking is available only to large apps like Amazon. The little guy gets snuffed out before they can even gain traction.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#575

Post by papertokyo »

22289d wrote: post #528
mlsu wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that there's the "5x rule" -- BOM cost is supposed to be 5x less than retail. Is there such a rule for fulfillment and delivery? Of course, 56% seems monstrously high to me, but then again, so did 5x BOM cost before I had that explained.

Food cost in restaurants in similarly shocking. They operate on metrics similar to BOM. Might shock you to find out how much that $40 pizza cost in dough, sauce, cheese and toppings. (Probably just a couple bucks).

And yet a 10% profit margin in the restaurant business is considered high.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#576

Post by Karrot_Kream »

genewitch wrote: post #351
smallnix wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

egress fees, inter-DC transfer fees, IP fees, ebs storage fees, transactional fees on things that are transactional. If you don't carefully engineer everything you'll get left with a $15,000 AWS bill. This doesn't cost Amazon anywhere near $15k to provide, so they just "waive" the fees if you promise to be a good little user.

Don't disagree with this, but this is the same in almost all cloud providers. Want to get started with Digital Ocean's app platform? You're paying for Container Engine to store your containers, then App Platform Business just to support scale-outs, then multiply this for the number of services you're deploying and make sure you don't have egress overages etc etc.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#577

Post by KorematsuFredt »

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…

Yup. Everything thinks the other person is greedy while they themselves are made of pure virtue.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#578

Post by asow92 »

likpok wrote: post #109
catiopatio wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> post-iOS change What is the iOS change you’re referring to?

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.

I've been saying for years—and it's been received un-popularly here on HN—that ATT has been a bad thing for the industry overall, and this thread is a primary case in point.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#579

Post by berniedurfee »

newsclues wrote: post #487
BowBun wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a good point, but I think the parent point is true as well. You still have people actually producing work, unable to compete on these platforms where Amazon will literally make a copy of their product at a lower price. This is the result of commoditizing 'starting a business' to the point of near-worthlessness in the bottom 50%+. Like you say, I don't value the businesses that simply re-sell re-labeled produ…

"This is the result of commoditizing 'starting a business' to the point of near-worthlessness in the bottom 50%+." Is this not just a market effect of saturating the market with competition because suddenly running a business is comparatively easy (communications technology, platforms and existing logistics and production networks) to any other era. I can probably start a company drop shipping crap on Amazon in a sho…

Very similar to the music industry, where technology has made producing music so easy the market is growing by tens of millions of new songs every year.

The slices of pie are getting very thin indeed. Especially when there are only a few pie delivery services to choose from and they take their slice first.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#580

Post by russelg »

Nullabillity wrote: post #414
smugma wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because your powerbank or charger definitely have those capabilities right?
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