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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

#621

Post by afavour »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #615
afavour wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> How many famous journalists can you name?

I’m not sure how that’s relevant. Ask a dozen people on the street who John Carmack is I’m sure you’d get a lot of blank faces. But if he walked into a dev shop looking for a job I think he’d probably get one.

Of course breaking a massive story is going to lead to you being well known. Perhaps only within journalistic circles but in the context of your career that’s the only thing that matters anyway.

(and to answer anecdote with anecdote: Woodward and Bernstein. Both have lived to ripe old ages, too, for what it’s worth)

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#622

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

adaptbrian wrote: post #599
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not connecting for me how breaking up monopolies is going to stop Chinese clones of Western products from winning price wars. It might change how the margin gets carved up between the people who make the clones and various middlemen but how would it stop the overall trend of cloned products?

It's all about discoverability, you wouldn't find them, tree falling in the woods, no one is around. Does it make a sound?

I would expect if Amazon disappeared, since people can’t go there to search for products to buy anymore, they’d use Google instead, or some other product search aggregator sites. They’d presumably still list the cheap sellers first (or whoever pays for an ad slot). That would be a huge change in the e-commerce industry, FTC can argue it benefits consumers because the prices of everything will be cheaper without Amazon’s fees, but I’m not seeing how to reduces the prevalence of cloned products.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#623

Post by cbsmith »

notyourwork wrote: post #475
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…

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

Yeah, but if you search and replaced the part where the $88 is to pay the manufacturer, and instead say it is to pay they employees and the cost of materials, it's not like that suddenly looks like a viable business.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#624

Post by dragonwriter »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #384
sib wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> Other than obvious things such as "Amazon products"..., in which case every manufacturer or retailer is a monopoly in their own products. The way this argument is normally presented is somewhat intentionally obtuse. Obviously Nike has a monopoly on Nike shoes, but "Nike shoes" isn't any kind of sensible market definition because you go to a shoe store and there are a dozen brands of shoes that are all pretty fungib…

> Or, it could be the case that only GM makes GM-compatible brake pads. In which case they would have a monopoly in that market. Not because it’s a monopoly on their brand of brake pads, but because it’s a monopoly on any brand of brake pads compatible with that brand of cars – which is something else entirely.

> Notice that they don’t even have to be the same company.

As a specific example (and note, that you also don’t have to be the literal sole supplier to have a legal monopoly under US antitrust law), the market Microsoft was found to have monopolized in their big antitrust case was the market for operating systems for IBM-compatible personal computers.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#625

Post by lulznews »

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.

[dead]

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#626

Post by duped »

nerdponx wrote: post #603
duped wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Apparently there are calls for her recusal on the grounds that she held a critical stance before her current appointment. Which is an odd thing to ask for in my opinion, but I guess it's worth trying if you're on the losing end of this.

They want to muddy the waters by arguing the FTC is impartial towards Amazon. But the problem with that argument is that it's not the job of the FTC to be impartial. Their mandate is to protect competition and consumers, which is naturally impartial to individual companies.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#627

Post by danielmarkbruce »

22289d wrote: post #620
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And it's still wrong. Amazon does 100s of billions of 1st party sales. As does Costco, Walmart, Target, and probably a dozen other stores I'm not aware of. It scales, big time. Choosing products to sell when you have a giant distribution engine is one of the most scaleable things in business.

If you want to trot out the principle of charity, it goes both ways. You assumed people were nitpicking. It was wrong. Every way you want to spin it by changing words, wrong.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#628

Post by sneak »

notyourwork wrote: post #475
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…

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

Yes. Curation is valuable.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#629

Post by 22289d »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #614
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…

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 wit…

> Unscalable is not synonymous with hard for the vast majority of people.

> It's not easy or hard. It's lucky.

Great, thank you for teaching me about the English language. None of this addresses a single thing about my point, it's just nitpicking my choice of words.

Use whateeeeeeeever words will make it through your compiler, insert those in place of mine - and that's what I meant.

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

> Which is what they seem to be doing.

Nitpick 2, Electric Boogaloo. Now you have a problem with the way I've used some other words or the absence of some qualifiers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#630

Post by WalterBright »

Guvante wrote: post #464
WalterBright wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they collected 51.8% in fee. That's insane. Back in the 80's, my company sold compilers through third party mail order houses. They all demanded providing the product to them at 50% of their selling price. It's what having somebody else advertise, collect orders, process payments, ship, and deal with returns is always going to cost you. If it's unacceptable to your business, sell directly. My company did both.

You can't offer lower prices directly so Amazon forces all your customers to pay for their services whether they get them or not. Or you can not be on Amazon but "just don't sell Windows if you don't want to pay extra" didn't work for Microsoft... Amazon charges for all of those things still. This isn't 50% off and we deal with everything it is ~50% but you still take all economic risk.

I neglected to mention that the mail order resellers demanded we provide them with product at 50% of the price we retailed it. So, if we lowered the retail price, we'd also have to lower the wholesale price.

Nobody was being stupid here. Or maybe I should say that one learns the ropes fast or goes bust.

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