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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

#611

Post by rottencupcakes »

dgreensp wrote: post #584

There are always so many blindly pro-business comments on stories like this, like when the Theranos stuff was happening, people were saying "come on, she was just pitching big returns and innovations like any start-up does," ignoring the difference between pitching and straight-up lying or deliberately misleading investors about current facts. Similarly, it seems like many commenters are defending Amazon not based on…

VC Twitter's crazy right now. It's as if Amazon was everybody's best friend.

User xattt says in a different thread on this story (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667379)

> I bet dollars-to-donuts that half of those folks don’t know how to articulate the sentimental attachment to their Prime subscription either.

It seems that applies up and down the population.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#612

Post by emodendroket »

pcchristie wrote: post #601
emodendroket wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Kindle has support for side loading books so I’m not sure how it’s locked to only reading Amazon purchases.

Is this new? I specifically went for Kobo years ago because my research told me that Kindle didn't have that capability, and Kobo did. Perhaps I didn't look hard enough.

No, even the very first model could be mounted as a USB drive and you could add files that way. It doesn’t natively support epubs — that might be what you’re thinking of — but converting them into mobi or azw format is pretty trivial anyway.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#613

Post by meetingthrower »

thghtihadanacct wrote: post #569
notyourwork wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is drop shopping the kind of business to fight for supporting? That’s all this is.

Dude needs to learn how to weld his own fire pits, teach some new employees, rinse repeat

Yeah all for < $200 shipped!

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#614

Post by ToucanLoucan »

22289d wrote: post #610
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally just said that they did the hard part, which is apparently identifying a product that consumers want and cannot buy. The commenter then says: why don't they just do all the apparently easy shit, which is making it, holding the inventory, shipping it, and handling returns/customer service. Maybe your point just sucks because finding some cheap garbage on AliExpress that you can sell with instagram ads is…

They did the unscalable part. That better? Are you happy now? Can you go find something else to nitpick? > finding some cheap garbage on AliExpress that you can sell with instagram ads isn't actually all that hard It's very hard. What you're missing are all of the thousands of people who try it and fail. And you see one person succeeding and say that's easy, they're just buying shit from China. No, they combined skil…

Unscalable is not synonymous with hard for the vast majority of people. If you communicate confusingly, you'll be asked for clarifications. That's not nitpicking and you can avoid it by using words for what they're for.

> What you're missing are all of the thousands of people who try it and fail.

It's not easy or hard. It's lucky. It's getting your ad seen in the right place with the right audience and taking off with enough sharing to build virality. Then your store will do a brief burst of good business before you fall back into irrelevance and continue.

It's highly analogous to gold rushes. And then as now, the people who get reliably rich off gold rushes aren't mining gold, they're selling shovels and pickaxes, namely: hustle influencers, shopify, and indeed, Amazon.

> That's not just ordering shit from China. If it were, Amazon would do it themselves

Buy some Amazon Basics stuff and check where it's made, then get back to me.

> and cut out all of these middleman

Which is what they seem to be doing.

Like again, for emphasis: Amazon is not a good guy here. They are neutral, at best. But I have very low sympathy for people who build their entire way of life on one single platform that could at any moment tell them to kick rocks. It's bad when YouTubers do it, it's bad when instagram influencers do it, and it's bad here too. And all of these usually end in similar ways. You're only as good as your last post, your last sale, your last quarter of profits and if your and the platform's interests diverge enough, you'll be dropped like a flaming bag of dogshit.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#615

Post by OnlineGladiator »

afavour wrote: post #595
OnlineGladiator wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this "if it were happening someone would leak it" argument throughout my life, even though I've lost count of all the counterexamples that disprove this mentality. Before Snowden PRISM was considered impossible (even though previous people had leaked it but never got picked up by the media cycle), before Epstein it was impossible that billionaires were trafficking children for sex, before 2008 it was impos…

The difference in all the examples you’ve given here is that none of the people involved are journalists. If you work on PRISM leaking its existence does nothing for your career. Quite the opposite in fact. But if you work for a newspaper and leak a massive story it’ll be very beneficial for your career.

The journalist most famous for leaking the Panama Papers died under mysterious circumstances. And almost nobody is aware of her name or even what's inside the Panama Papers.

How many famous journalists can you name? I'm not saying there aren't journalists that want to do good work and become famous as a result. But despite their efforts they're mostly fighting a losing battle.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#616

Post by Stephen_0xFF »

omnimus wrote: post #504
notyourwork wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ding ding ding. Middlemen get squeezed and are mad about it would be equally fair headline here.

Amazon is also the middlemen.

Yeah, but they created a moat and became sticky. Netflix knew they were a middleman too so they started to produce their own content years before the streaming wars. I worked for one near the border that bought American industrial parts and sold it to Mexican factories. I helped build their quoting and ERP software, but the boss wanted to build a platform for him and his competition to try to become sticky and build a moat. Middlemen should always be finding ways to stay in the process.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#617

Post by danielmarkbruce »

22289d wrote: post #610
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally just said that they did the hard part, which is apparently identifying a product that consumers want and cannot buy. The commenter then says: why don't they just do all the apparently easy shit, which is making it, holding the inventory, shipping it, and handling returns/customer service. Maybe your point just sucks because finding some cheap garbage on AliExpress that you can sell with instagram ads is…

They did the unscalable part. That better? Are you happy now? Can you go find something else to nitpick? > finding some cheap garbage on AliExpress that you can sell with instagram ads isn't actually all that hard It's very hard. What you're missing are all of the thousands of people who try it and fail. And you see one person succeeding and say that's easy, they're just buying shit from China. No, they combined skil…

No one is nitpicking. They just don't buy your argument."nitpick" implies a person is addressing a minor detail and not addressing the central point. This person, and the comment above (by me) is directly addressing the central point you made, and saying it's weak.

Building all the infrastructure required for FBA is much more difficult than choosing products. The proof is in how many people have done one v the other. Amazon does a decent job on both sides - building the infrastructure, and figuring which products to sell, at scale (they do 100's of billions of non 3rd party sales every year).

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#618

Post by afavour »

influxmoment wrote: post #604
afavour wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you say career ending moment? I think I misread that. Who wants a former employee and their lawyers targeting your reputation. Do you know anything about what whistleblowers have to go through?

> Do you know anything about what whistleblowers have to go through?

We’re talking about professional journalists here. I’m quite sure they’re aware of it all. If the story is newsworthy and backed by evidence you’d be able to take it to any competing newspaper. I imagine the Wall Street Journal’s legal team would be happy to bear the brunt of any fallout, it’s their job.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#619

Post by dragonwriter »

sib wrote: post #339
dragonwriter wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eBo…

> “Monopoly: the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.”

That is not the applicable definition for US antitrust law.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#620

Post by 22289d »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #617
22289d wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did the unscalable part. That better? Are you happy now? Can you go find something else to nitpick? > finding some cheap garbage on AliExpress that you can sell with instagram ads isn't actually all that hard It's very hard. What you're missing are all of the thousands of people who try it and fail. And you see one person succeeding and say that's easy, they're just buying shit from China. No, they combined skil…

No one is nitpicking. They just don't buy your argument."nitpick" implies a person is addressing a minor detail and not addressing the central point. This person, and the comment above (by me) is directly addressing the central point you made, and saying it's weak. Building all the infrastructure required for FBA is much more difficult than choosing products. The proof is in how many people have done one v the other.…

I rephrased it to accommodate the nitpicking and you completely ignored it, going right back to hard/easy rather than scalable/unscalable.

FBA is scalable.

These people are doing the unscalable part.

"But I was nitpicking whether the word nitpicking was accurate"

I'm not choosing a new word, get out your thesaurus. Then read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

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