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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

#721

Post by jupp0r »

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…

Where's the harm for consumers here? All I see is that I can now buy guitar pedals for a fraction of the price. Isn't consumer harm the point of anti trust?

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#722

Post by havnagiggle »

abduhl wrote: post #559
letsdothisagain wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-competitive bit is they have all the sales information that would typically be a trade secret for a company. Go ahead, call up your local 7-11 and ask them what their sales were for the quarter. They'll tell you to fuck off.

But Amazon is the 7-11 (and more)! It is the customer facing part of the business that houses and delivers the beef jerky to the ultimate customer. 7-11 sees that jerky sells, that lots of brands can sell jerky, that consumers don’t seem to care about the brand of jerky as long as it says teriyaki, and so 7-11 now sells 7-11 basics teriyaki jerky. The FBA middlemen are more like traveling salesmen - they take an orde…

If we're coming up with brick and mortar analogies, it's got to be grocery stores and generic branded items. Kraft Mac vs Great Value.

It's hard for me to say Amazon shouldn't be able to do it while every grocery store can, but there seems to be a quantitative difference because of the ridiculous number of options online vs the finite shelf space of a brick and mortar.

All the same economic games are played. Items are placed on specific shelves to drive specific sales, etc. Sale numbers are known by the store and they get their cut.

The distinguisher is supposed to be in the quality. Premium vs generic. That doesn't seem to play out healthily in Amazon's marketplace.

Maybe one difference is the consumable nature of the grocery products vs what one typically buys online (Amazon batteries as opposed to an animal carrier). Or maybe we have given up too much with the consolidation of grocery chains the last few decades and that is equally problematic.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#723

Post by m463 »

sib wrote: post #538
m463 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I can't figure out is that many books (such as Tor) have a notice: At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. Are these encrypted anyway on kindle?

Because Amazon allows publishers to choose to sell eBooks without DRM. If an eBook sold in the Kindle store has DRM, the publisher chose to have it that way.

yes, but is the kindle data file encrypted?

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#724

Post by chii »

eru wrote: post #597
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?

We should encourage more price wars. They are good for customers.

Except once the price war is over, the consolidation of market share to one or a few players means that there is a good chance of monopoly pricing.

Unless, if the price wars are never over.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#725

Post by toasterlovin »

BeetleB wrote: post #600
sokoloff wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seller Fulfilled Prime is also a thing: https://sell.amazon.com/programs/seller-fulfilled-prime

Did not know about it - is it new? Wonder what additional fees are associated with it.

It's not new, but admission to the program has been unofficially paused for years. They just announced in the last few weeks that they're relaunching the program.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#726

Post by chii »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #572
BizarroLand wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" mar…

> And, one single distribution channel (the amazon website) doesn't define a market (with almost zero exceptions, amazon's website not being one).

if amazon captures a large ratio of people buying goods online, i would certainly consider amazon itself a market. But unless they also control some other aspect of the online market, it would be hard to claim they're a monopoly tbh.

_Anyone_ can setup an e-commerce site and sell online. Amazon doesn't quite fully control the hosting, IP and backend servers completely!

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#727

Post by starluz »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #691
TylerE wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And saying just don't use FBA is no solution either. Shipping large heavy stuff is expensive, and I best Amazon has much better rates negotiated with the carriers.

Storage plus shipping through FBA isn’t cheap. The problem isn’t that FBA is expensive, the problem is that selling on Amazon but not via FBA is heavily punished with placement and appearance leading to poor conversion rates.

Yes this is the issue for consumers as well. The first 16 pages of every search are nearly identical low quality fba products. Need a search layer to find the small sellers!

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#728

Post by starluz »

SenAnder wrote: post #696
newsclues wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Amazon inflating rates after capturing the market, permitting counterfeits, and penalizing sellers offering lower prices off-Amazon, has nothing to do with market efficiency or commoditization.

Not saying it’s right but this has been their business model from day one back when it was just books

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#729

Post by sfmike »

Made a purchase that was cancelled with shop with points. The points won't return and are "stuck in limbo". Cancelled Order doesn't show in order history either. I've contacted support with at least 50 support agents over several months and the standard you won't be charged if it's cancelled templated response is all they can muster to reply with. There's no way to contact anyone besides the templated responses. Essentially 900 dollars are gone and no support possible.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#730

Post by nebula8804 »

runako wrote: post #270
tqi wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lobbying works. Tech will eventually figure this out. Tech is well aware of this, and is spending accordingly[1]. However I think politics are a bigger motivating factor, and taking "tech" to task is viewed as a good way to score points (probably helps that legacy media views tech as direct competitors, and covers them accordingly). [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/23/apple-ramped-up-lobbying-spe...

They kind of get it, but are not at the magnitude yet where it would be effective enough to squash these types of interventions. By comparison, healthcare lobbying spends more every quarter what Big Tech did in all of 2022.

There was one lasting lesson I learned from AOC's first election and the subsequent attempts to challenge many seats at all levels of government. That incumbents have organizations that will spend as much money as they can to stop a challenger. In the case of the Queens DA race(which is the first time AOC endorsed somebody), I seem to recall that the local democratic council had to blow their entire budget to try and stop Caban(AOC's endorsed candidate). They did manage to defeat her by 60 votes but the lesson I learned is that we should be running candidates in every single seat in every single race in every single election. Some groups like Brand New Congress have attempted this but it is tough to challenge all 435 members of the house. Unfortunately all these groups are on retreat since Biden got elected. It took a candidate like Trump to make people realize that they had hit a new low and to start doing something. Biden and the party is using the fear of Trump coming back to now suppress any dissent.

Yes the overwhelming majority will lose but it makes continuing business as usual as expensive as humanly possible. There is no way all these companies can recover every last penny if this is continually done every election. (There are small time elections happening every year so there really needs to be challengers at all levels)

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