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The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

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Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#191

Post by brvsft »

elashri wrote: post #8
koalaman wrote: post #6

This has been pretty obvious for a while. Whenever I do product searches on Amazon the prime eligible results are more expensive by exactly the shipping costs of the non prime vendors. The only reason I keep it is for the video service which I'm guessing is the same for a lot of people.

> The only reason I keep it is for the video service which I'm guessing is the same for a lot of people. Which will start having ads unless you pay a fee for the ad-free experience starting next year [1] [1] https://www.npr.org/2023/09/22/1201028854/amazon-prime-video...

Nice, looks like I have an actual reason to convince my wife that we switch to Instacart next year.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#193

Post by Qwertious »

jbombadil wrote: post #112
exabrial wrote: post #25

Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, break them all up. And for the love of crap, stop approving billion dollar mergers.

This. Also add most major telcos, ISPs and airlines to the list as well. We love capitalism. It’s basis is competition. Let’s get us some of that.

Capitalism is based on competition, but the rules of said competition are largely written by the winners of said competition - this isn't a perversion of capitalism, this is capitalism as it has always functioned in reality. Like, oil companies get significant political sway over our policy on climate change, which is why over the last 40 years, the biggest sources of emissions reduction were the 2008 GFC and the 2020 lockdowns.

The #1 reason why Comcast hasn't been ousted by local community fiber networks is because Comcast politically lobbied to make it illegal. This is normal. The solution is to cut the moneyed interests out of politics as harshly as possible, because otherwise we'll always require the permission of junk-food companies before we limit how much sodium is permitted in kid's food.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#194

Post by throwaway14356 »

endisneigh wrote: post #190
throwaway14356 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it would be sensible to require a reason for refusing to do business with someone. Normally it wouldn't be but if you are a repeat offender it seems a sensible requirement

Unless it's a protected class you can refuse to do business with anyone for any reason. Plenty of supreme court cases on this.

certainly, you can write anything on the form. Any reason is not without? I do doubt you can refuse one foo for being fooish but not the other. Now multiply by 10 000 and pretend you are explaining it to the judge in a context where you've been convicted multiple times.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#195

Post by rawgabbit »

TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #189

I don't understand why you would "Break-Up" Amazon? Why can't we just have common rules that says "Hey, we will fine you $50M a day you continue to do X,Y,Z?". Then we have precedence and law to back up doing monopolistic things. How does breaking a company work? I mean... we broke up Microsoft and that only slowed them down for a few years.

When was Microsoft broken up? I remember the Microsoft was sued for anti competitive behavior but nothing of consequence happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#196

Post by fallat »

someonehere wrote: post #54

What does breaking up Amazon look like? I’m genuinely curious because half the comments I see in here are “break up Amazon!” or “break up FAANG!” What does that look like? What would Amazon look like if broken up? In the end we all know lobbyists from Amazon will somehow influence their outcome.

Thanks for saying this, I'd love to see people talking about this over everything else.

Maybe it looks like multiple companies, i.e. AWS becomes separated with its own CEO, etc.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#197

Post by lsedgwick »

I think this demonstrates a way in which all centralized power becomes, for good or for ill, partially absorbed into state power. A major country's government will always be able to exert lots of leverage against, e.g. tech companies, whether for legitimate or illegitimate reasons, it matters not which. They can always threaten regulatory or legislative actions which would be annoying or devastating to shareholders. Hence, behind-the-scenes conversations will always have an implicit fact of "please censor as we ask, provide data and backdoored access to which servers we ask, please don't take on the wrong political causes, elsewise there will be consequences."

Goodness knows that if the intelligence community or state law enforcement has ever wanted access to anything in AWS, now of all times would be when they have the easiest time asking for it! Anything to curry favor with someone who can speak a word of support to federal agencies and state officials.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#198

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

justinator wrote: post #133
EGreg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real solution is an open source Amazon. What happened to Magento? Does it have any traction? Why sell on Amazon instead of your own site? Can’t competitors to FBA spring up that have great logistics? Are there any? Can anyone link me to them?

Magento was badly designed- infinite levels of directories. Good luck on upgrade. There’s plenty of self hosted online stores. That’s hardly the problem.

I did a single contract for a Magento site and decided never again.

It was like a group of Java developers decided to write PHP code and it was horrific. I would estimate 80% of the classes in that codebase didn't have any implementing code in them.

Literally the only thing I liked about Magento was it's ability to outline everything that was being rendered to make it easier for you to identify the changes to templates you needed to make.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#199

Post by oogali »

EGreg wrote: post #122
Jensson wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is none of Amazons business what prices they put when they list their wares on other services, the only reason they care is that they want to crush the competition. Dictating how retailers can interact with your competitors is anti-competitive. Dictating what prices they can offer when they put up listings is a part of that, it is anti-competitive.

To be fair, every single wholesaler operates this way. I have personalky spoken to wholesalers who sell widgets X (lighters etc) to retail stores. If the retail stores undercut everyone else and drop the price below MSRP, they will exclude them in the future. There is centralized price control even though the retailers are free to do what they want. That is done by auto dealers and anyone else who does MSRP. The diff…

To shine a little more light, what you're referring to is called a minimum advertised price policy, or MAPP.

And as you've stated, it's done by anyone who publishes a MSRP.

https://www.deltafaucet.com/for-professionals/product-resour...

https://assets.ctfassets.net/zlhl2y58oyef/3wENIXr7qvqyOoVD6R...

https://www.pricespider.com/Blog/map-policy-faqs/

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#200

Post by hnbad »

hnuser847 wrote: post #129
zb3 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pay these fees so the products aren't cheap. And Amazon (using its size) made it impossible for sellers to sell their products cheaper elsewhere. This is anticompetitive.

> You pay these fees so the products aren't cheap. Except they are, otherwise consumers wouldn't use Amazon. Whenever I want to buy anything, I check Amazon first. 9 times out of 10 it's the same price as every other retailer with the added benefit of free shipping and free returns. If that wasn't the case, I would have no reason to use Amazon.

I'm a consumer who uses Amazon for 90% of their online shopping and let me tell you: I'm not doing it because Amazon is cheap. In recent years more often than not, Amazon isn't actually the cheapest option except for the occasional deal for a subpar product they want to remove from their inventory (but these would be cheap in brick and mortar stores too). Even the deals are largely bogus: "Prime Day" largely exists to buy Amazon equipment at a more reasonable price point and the rest of the time the deals are either for "stocking fillers" (i.e. the kind of stuff you'd find in the discount bin at the supermarket) or noname white label dropshipping products you can barely tell apart from the real deal until they arrive.

I don't use Amazon because it's cheap. I use it because it's convenient. I can do 99% of my non-groceries shopping on Amazon and I get 30 day free returns on most products and next day delivery for some of them, not to mention free shipping on most things I buy (or near-free shipping if you consider the cost of Prime).

What's been pushing me away from Amazon recently is that they're not very good (or even increasingly worse) for some categories of products and in many cases search results are cluttered by Chinese dropshipping products to the point I can't find trustworthier brands at all or for categories I'm less familiar with have to do research to figure out which brands actually exist outside of Amazon's Chinese dropshipping hell. And again because of the free returns (and in the case of non-free returns the A-to-Z guarantee still often resulting in free returns or full refunds) this is not a cost issue but more about the reduction in convenience.

Mind you, I live in Germany and German Amazon is likely different. But Amazon is still the biggest online retailer here despite not being the cheapest. Arguably it still maintains the illusion of being the cheapest because of the free shipping (if you pay for Prime) and the constant barrage of "deals".

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