791–800 of 930 posts
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If ‘industry’ is selling cheap tat by invading privacy then anything bad for that is good for society.
Are its unintended consequences in propping up monopoly also good for ‘society’, then? Hate to break it to you, but the topic is a bit more nuanced than ‘privacy good’ ‘ads bad’.
In my opinion, Amazon needs to be split into at least 4 independent entities: - Online marketplace - Consumer products - Internet infrastructure - Delivery logistics Similar to the three-tier distribution system for beer in most states (a brewer cannot be a wholesaler or a retailer). This makes it easier for smaller players can compete with the big ones on quality at least, if not price or recognition. (Edit: format)
>(a brewer cannot be a wholesaler or a retailer) Does that mean brewpubs can't exist or just that they couldn't also sell the beer bottled? But regarding Amazon, I agree.
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Most things aren't bought on Amazon, but if you're a middleman droppshipping stuff from China, Amazon is an easy way to get in front of a lot of eyeballs. It's not clear to me why droppshippers deserve special care and treatment by the FTC.
The chair of the FTC is Lina Khan. As a law student, she wrote this article [1] for the Yale Law Journal. It attracted so much attention in the antitrust law community that it led to her becoming the youngest FTC chair in history. She has literally been building this case against Amazon since she was a student. It’s not just about dropshippers. It’s also about how Amazon uses automated price controls, guided by scrap…
From what I recall, the reason why her argument was recognized is because it solved a thorny problem of US anti trust law, proving harm.
Currently, in the US what matters is showing that consumer welfare was harmed. AINAL but proving harm is not easy - Amazon in particular reduces prices to the end customer, increases choices and makes sales easier.
This is where most arguments died, however her approach had enough merit to pursue.
However, it seems her approach and argument has changed, and is more couched in terms of current legalese - more focused on showing consumer harm than applying a new legal approach.
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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?
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You feel in bad faith here. But sure, lets start looking at the points: Paragraph 1, almost literally: "the early days of the internet were great for competition..." I, uh, don't know what to tell you here. Isn't even really a point. Paragraph 2: Amazon is big. Paragraph 3: Amazon is a monopolist. 4: Amazon's fees can be upwards of half the costs of sellers. This point, finally, could be something. The examples that…
for someone who accused me of bad faith in their first breath, you sure don't seem to be trying hard to accurately represent the specific practices Amazon engaged in as described in the complaint, and lazily misrepresenting them isn't the same as proving that they foster competition rather than stifle it.
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…
They did all those things unsustainably so they could gain market share and raise prices when people were locked in. Similar to Uber and AirBnB etc. All those things are good but not feasible and subsidized by the capital/venture markets. The game is market share and ecosystem lock-in both from suppliers and customers. A truly competitive marketplace allows any supplier to easily match with any customer. Suppliers ga…
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for someone who accused me of bad faith in their first breath, you sure don't seem to be trying hard to accurately represent the specific practices Amazon engaged in as described in the complaint, and lazily misrepresenting them isn't the same as proving that they foster competition rather than stifle it.
Then give me the points you feel are strong! :D Seriously, what are the strong points? I don't expect a full paragraph breakdown, as it is an expectedly boring document. Apologies if my misguided attempt is turning you off. I was honestly amused at how much of the document is naked assertions with no real evidence. (Edit: Specifically, I was amused with how much of the document is essentially "Amazon has gotten worse…
Your excuses of "so and so did it too" are meaningless, as are any slippery slope fallacies, as are your personal anecdotes and observations (the latter of which, no fault to you, simply can't be trusted anyways, as my own observations are the opposite). The only relevant questions are whether Amazon did it (they did) and whether it fosters competition vs. stifling it (seems like the latter).
So, again, go ahead and try to honestly list the behaviors like the one above, and explain how either Amazon didn't engage in that behavior, or how the behaviors fostered competition vs. stifling it. Otherwise, it seems like more of the "where's the line???" FUD I mentioned earlier.
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I ran a small FBA business for a year nowhere near any scale and it was an interesting lesson. People who weigh in on these tech topics should actually try these things out to understand them better. It's nothing like listing on eBay where there's some haircut off the top and that's that. There are fees for - accepting inventory, holding inventory, returning unsold inventory, shipping sales, processing returns, destr…
Those fullfillment fees are nothing new. I worked for a publisher thirty years ago and they had a similar network of fees. The only difference was they were predictable in that the fee schedule changed only at time of contract renewal. Whats different is that the fulfillment centers then couldn't see our books and weren't looking over our shoulder seeing our accounting figures, so as to grab the profits the moment it…
People will walk away, there's no choice and MegaCorps know this, so they will subtly lock down movement.
Medium sized businesses are the buttery smooth, slippery slope to hell these days.
Attention management and product discovery has to be done by permenantly white organizations, monasteries, regulated-to-inaction government arms, independent offshoots of a benevolent billionaire's philanthropy...
The panopticon doesn't just effecy day-to-day life... it also strangles the power and wealth of businesses to death.
I have been saying it for years, and people just dismiss it, why would a billion dollar company prey on a million dollar company, they have bigger opportunities...
Well. There it is.
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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…
They farm out manufacturing to China, but if they designed the products, this isn’t very different from having Foxconn assemble iPhones. But of course, now the Chinese manufacturer could sell their design directly and undercut them, since they aren’t Apple. If they are using a design from the manufacturer, I have no sympathy for them. They are just trying to make money by adding some marketing and connecting dots tog…
There's an increasing trend of foreign manufacturers copying (or even simply producing unlabelled variants) popular products then white labelling them. You see this all over Amazon where there are dozens of brands selling the exact same product with their name stamped on it. Those products are always some slight variation of a bit name.
* Solo Stove - dozens of identical knock-offs
* Power screwdrivers - Nearly limitless variations of the popular brands
* Theragun/Hypervolt - Literally dozens of knock-offs with slight variations in packaging.
This continues for nearly every single category.
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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.