huh. i didn’t know the FTC did this. i thought anti trust was federal territory with DOJ. is TFA just borrowing the word monopoly and this isn’t an anti trust case?
FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
701–710 of 930 posts
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#702Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that different from Walmart selling their Great Value store brand? They see what products sell well then formulate their own cheaper alternative, maybe even giving their product better shelf placement. Every national grocer does this. It seems to be a pretty close analog yet nobody bats an eye at the practice.
The local Kroger supermarket has Kroger branded items on the shelf right next to the national brand. The latter is always more expensive, I usually buy the Kroger brand. The supermarket wouldn't stock the national brands at all if customers weren't buying them.
I don't know Kroger, but in a lot of cases the store brand is just a label change on the national brand.
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#703> “We’re bringing this case because Amazon’s illegal conduct has stifled competition across a huge swath of the online economy. Amazon is a monopolist that uses its power to hike prices on American shoppers and charge sky-high fees on hundreds of thousands of online sellers,” said John Newman, Deputy Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “Seldom in the history of U.S. antitrust law has one case had the potential to do so much good for so many people.”
Really, really hope this isn't another woke crusade by Lina "0-2" Khan that promises to delivery a random victory to "the common person" and then ultimately fail to do anything meaningful.
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#704FBA 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…
The issue is that Amazon is taking over more and more parts of the process from manufacturing to delivery to the end user.
What you don't seem to understand is that they "let" Amazon handle warehousing and logistics because Amazon has in many ways forced this.
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#705Earlier 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.
Career defining? Nobody wants to hire rats that you can't trust.
One person's rat is another's whistleblower. For a journalist, it'd absolutely be a career defining story.
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#706Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#707This rings a little hollow to me because as a consumer, wouldn't I have noticed a lack of non-amazon options? My family buys on Amazon a lot but I am well aware that I can buy any of that stuff, including at times for a lower price, elsewhere - from company website to Costco to Walmart market, via Google shopping, etc. Doesn't the existence of these infinity choices make claims of monopoly a bit farfetched? I am sure…
> This rings a little hollow to me because as a consumer, wouldn't I have noticed a lack of non-amazon options?
You haven’t? What sorts of products do u typically browse/shop for?
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#708This is a classic antitrust case. Like the film studios in Hollywood controlled talent, finance, production and distribution, Amazon controls too many parts of the process giving them undue market power with which they abuse their so called partners. They should absolutely be broken up.
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#709Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guessing this is also related, from page 10: Amazon has implemented an algorithm for the express purpose of deterring other online stores from offering lower prices. [redacted] Rather than trying to compete, Amazon uses [redacted] Ultimately, this conduct is meant to deter rivals from attempting to compete on price altogether-competition that could bring lower prices to tens of millions of American households. As a r…
What especially rankles is how Amazon doesn’t give a fuck about counterfeits. So they’re allowing counterfeits (amplifying the mentioned effect) to discourage direct-sellers from attempting to compete on price. Meanwhile, I have to order from direct sellers to be sure I will get a genuine, new product. So I don’t even get Amazon’s lower-but-still-higher-than-optimal price, but a yet higher one. As far as I’m concerne…
Counterfeits: In August 2014, I purchased from Amazon, shipped from Amazon (just checked my order history to verify), an Apple MagSafe Power Adapter. It was clearly counterfeit.
I contacted Amazon and told them it was fake, without hesitation they told me to throw it away and they were sending me a replacement.
It would be hard for me to believe that they didn't know exactly which company shipped them that product.
It would be easy for me to believe that they didn't notify every other customer that received that product from the same shipment.
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#710Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read both - I don't see anything odd here. Seems like like the thesis of the FTC's case includes the natural continuation of some of Lina Khan's ideas, plus additional focus on the Amazon Seller economiy.
The abstract of the link is that Amazon’s monopoly power has manifested itself in _under_ pricing products. The FTC claim is that Amazon _over_ prices products. They are in direct opposition.
I see how that would appear to be a contradiction. However, your takeaway from the Yale Law Journal link is incomplete.
The Yale article argues that Amazon has avoided anti-trust scrutiny because most anti-trust regulators are laser-focused on price and output (is Amazon fixing artificially high prices? Is Amazon artificially limiting output?), and this approach misses the ways in which Amazon limits competition (mainly predatory under-pricing and vertical integration). The article goes on to suggest that by ignoring these, antitrust regulators are "overlooking the structural weakening of competition until it becomes difficult to address effectively, an approach that undermines consumer welfare."
You're right that the article does talk about practices that aren't mentioned in the complaint, like predatory under-pricing.
However, it also discusses the ways in which Amazon uses vertical integration to create barriers and reduce competition. Here I quote from the article:
>Amazon is positioned to use its dominance across online retail and delivery in ways that involve tying, are exclusionary, and create entry barriers. That is, Amazon’s distortion of the delivery sector in turn creates anticompetitive challenges in the retail sector. For example, sellers who use FBA have a better chance of being listed higher in Amazon search results than those who do not, which means Amazon is tying the outcomes it generates for sellers using its retail platform to whether they also use its delivery business. Amazon is also positioned to use its logistics infrastructure to deliver its own retail goods faster than those of independent sellers that use its platform and fulfillment service—a form of discrimination that exemplifies traditional concerns about vertical integration.
>The clearest example of how the company leverages its power across online businesses is Amazon Marketplace, where third-party retailers sell their wares. Since Amazon commands a large share of e-commerce traffic, many smaller merchants find it necessary to use its site to draw buyers.These sellers list their goods on Amazon’s platform and the company collects fees ranging from 6% to 50% of their sales from them.
These quotes map pretty cleanly onto two of the complaint's allegations:
>Conditioning sellers’ ability to obtain “Prime” eligibility for their products—a virtual necessity for doing business on Amazon—on sellers using Amazon’s costly fulfillment service, which has made it substantially more expensive for sellers on Amazon to also offer their products on other platforms. This unlawful coercion has in turn limited competitors’ ability to effectively compete against Amazon.
>Charging costly fees on the hundreds of thousands of sellers that currently have no choice but to rely on Amazon to stay in business. These fees range from a monthly fee sellers must pay for each item sold, to advertising fees that have become virtually necessary for sellers to do business. Combined, all of these fees force many sellers to pay close to 50% of their total revenues to Amazon. These fees harm not only sellers but also shoppers, who pay increased prices for thousands of products sold on or off Amazon.
At the end of the day, Amazon is a very big company that does a lot of different things at the same time. It could be under-pricing ebooks and overcharging FBA sellers at the same time.
The point of the Yale Law School article is that anti-trust law ignores anti-competitive practices until they significantly distort prices across the company's largest market, but that these practices have a chilling effect on competition far before that point. Khan argues that anti-trust regulators should go after companies using these practices before they cement market leadership and fully edge out competitors.
>On the Chicago School’s [(the pre-existing paradigm's)] account, Amazon’s vertical integration would only be harmful if and when it chooses to use its dominance in delivery and retail to hike fees to consumers. Amazon has already raised Prime prices. But antitrust enforcers should be equally concerned about the fact that Amazon increasingly controls the infrastructure of online commerce—and the ways in which it is harnessing this dominance to expand and advantage its new business ventures.
This is exactly what Khan's FTC is doing now.