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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

#651

Post by somsak2 »

billjings wrote: post #645
mrraj wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You have a hard time sympathizing? Say what you will about their means of getting it, but this person did 100% of the leg work of getting that sale. That sale doesn't exists without them. And Amazon gets the MAJORITY of the revenue cut for that? I sympathize with the idea that China should get more of that, but make no mistake: Amazon's logistics and warehousing were not an option here. They were the cost of doing bu…

> this person did 100% of the leg work of getting that sale. That sale doesn't exists without them.

I don't really see it that way. The sale wouldn't exist without anyone in the pipeline (Amazon, manufacturer in China, shipping merchant, etc.)

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#653

Post by ameister14 »

stale2002 wrote: post #649
ameister14 wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The competitive market has multiple goals - lower prices for consumers is only one of them. Big companies compete in the market by offering the same quality for a lower price. That's good, no problem with them doing that. The problem is when the big companies crush nascent competitors by using their advantages in the market and not by being better quality or more consistent. That's bad; it stifles innovation and crea…

> by using their advantages in the market and not by being better quality or more consistent But they have a lower price. That's competition working as intended. Yes, the lower price thing should win out against the more expensive product. > to charge supracompetitive prices. We aren't seeing too high prices. We are seeing low prices and then competitors that suck complaining about the fact that they suck in comparis…

That is not competition working as intended.

So you can have pro-competitive behavior (lower price) that balances out anti-competitive behavior (crushing nascent competitors through market manipulation or cartels); That doesn't mean everything you do is above board. It means that while the lower prices are there, a certain amount of anti-competitive behavior has been acceptable because the net outcome to consumers is theoretically positive.

[edit] Think about this - if you can win with lower prices, why do the other anti-competitive behaviors? Why not just have lower prices and let others try to compete with higher quality or lower prices than you? Wouldn't that be better?

The reality of this is, though, that the monopoly you form affects far more than the consumer product price. What the FTC is saying here is that they are moving back to structural restriction rather than simply allowing anti-competitive behavior so long as the price is good, a la the Chicago School.

>We are seeing low prices and then competitors that suck complaining about the fact that they suck in comparison to the more competitive company.

That's not what we're seeing, though.

What we are seeing is artificially high prices. One of the allegations is that if a seller prices below Amazon, Amazon removes their access to market.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#654

Post by ameister14 »

lvl102 wrote: post #225
binarymax wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of the case is to show that they control a monopoly. When there's a monopoly, you can't go anywhere else!

And my point, as someone who’s worked in antitrust field for over a decade, is that Amazon is a company that does the least to exert monopoly power out of all the big tech companies. In fact, they do so little that I think they are being stupid.

That's not a really good point.

"They're bad, but they aren't as bad as those other guys. In fact, I think they are stupid for not being worse."

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#655

Post by kortilla »

likpok wrote: post #194
lvl102 wrote: post #114

Out of all the natural tech monopolies, Amazon is the ONLY one that did the opposite of exercising market power. They actually brought fast shipping to the market. A decade ago, you had to pay a crap ton of money to ship things even two days. They forced the incumbents such as Walmart to change. They’re constantly improving e-commerce. Heck they even opened up aws and created an entire industry. Amazon did more to re…

Less market concentration. Lina Khan, the current head of the FTC, argued before she got the job that market concentration and not consumer harm was a better target for antitrust enforcement. Amazon does exercise a fair amount of their market power. FBA policies are generous to the consumer and to amazon, taking it out of the third party sellers. The other classic example was IIRC diapers.com which was a sharp compet…

>market concentration and not consumer harm was a better target for antitrust enforcement.

By what reasoning? If it’s not harming consumers then what is the issue being raised

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#656

Post by happycube »

malfist wrote: post #212
autoexec wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never once seen a store that removed the major name brands from the shelves and only offered their own generic brand. You might argue that having generics on the shelves at all means that new small brands have to pay more for placement, but that's not the same thing as stealing product ideas and leaving no other option but the generic version of that thing on the shelves.

Actually, isn't that what Bed Bath and Beyond did? Partly the cause of their failure?

The root cause of their failure was stock buybacks, which was >100% of their debt at the end.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#657

Post by cm2012 »

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…

You can thank Apple's IOS 14.5 updates for making Facebook/IG/TT ads much less effective than they used to be for SMBs.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#658

Post by nemothekid »

billjings wrote: post #645
mrraj wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You have a hard time sympathizing? Say what you will about their means of getting it, but this person did 100% of the leg work of getting that sale. That sale doesn't exists without them. And Amazon gets the MAJORITY of the revenue cut for that? I sympathize with the idea that China should get more of that, but make no mistake: Amazon's logistics and warehousing were not an option here. They were the cost of doing bu…

>100% of the leg work of getting that sale.

What leg work? Customer acquisition? They paid amazon for that. Delivery? They paid amazon for that. Manufacturing? They paid China for that.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#660

Post by kortilla »

bpicolo wrote: post #484
gorbachev wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. You buy stock in the law firm(s) representing Amazon on this. Assuming they're a publicly traded.

Publicly traded law firms aren't currently a thing in the US, because non-lawyer ownership (or in this case, partial ownership) of law firms has been against legal ethics codes for a long time: https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/practice-innovat...

Coincidental how that worked out in the lawyers’ favor.
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