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And media companies...
Especially the media companies! They put artificial limits on the range of acceptable thoughts, acting as both a muzzle and a noose around the neck of the public.
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Here are some possibilities (not claiming these are practical or a solution): The first is splitting Amazon-retail from their other products (Alexa, Ring, AWS, etc.) The second is splitting Amazon-logistics out. I'm not exactly sure how this would work, but it could be argued that Amazon logistics could operate standalone.
The latter seems plausible to me, but the former makes no sense. If the problem is that Amazon-retail has too much market power, how would splitting off AWS help with that problem? Amazon-retail would still have the same fraction of the retail market as before.
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When Facebook was founded there was no Facebook. Now there is a Facebook. When there's a better alternative customers are less likely to try out your new, less good idea. Can you give an example of someone serious using IPFS instead of S3? I don't really get what "all storage worldwide" means.
Except there was a Facebook and it was called MySpace. Facebook won because people enjoyed using it better.
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You can repeat that comment here as many times as you want but it will not make it a valid one. Amazon is practically a monopoly, and they have reached that position by often selling goods below COG prices, incurring losses but outliving the competition. Now without a competitive marketplace for quite a lot of stuff they can dictate the prices at a loss for everyone except them. If somebody was to challenge them with…
Amazon isn't a monopoly by any definition. There are plenty of places to buy things. Repeating it over and over again won't change reality. Feel free to bookmark this and come back to it 10 years from now. Amazon won't be broken up, either. Customers are so lazy they want the government do everything for them. If you don't like Amazon, close the tab and go to eBay.com or Walmart.com. It's very easy, and can be done i…
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/monopoly "For instance, the term monopoly may be referring to instances where: [...] There are many buyers or sellers, but one actor has enough market share to dictate prices (near monopolies)"
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I'm not replying to anything you might reply with because the rest of your comments in this thread have clearly been in bad faith. But this was one of the few smoking gun comments betraying either a biased position you hold or your lack of background on the topic, so it was easy enough to just post a link to an authoritative source + definition and just move on.
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So, to be clear, you have no problem with Amazon writing their own laws and collecting their own taxes? Because that is what they are effectively doing.
If sellers were obligated to sell on Amazon that would be the case, but it's not, is it? Ironically, people complaining about this are exacerbating the issue. If sellers who actually cared left Amazon it would loosen Amazon's dominance in e-commerce.
I’m not sure I agree with the opening premise that offering “free shipping” is dangling a free lunch that doesn’t exist. Technically this is true but it makes a lot of sense by creating an analogous experience as with retail. If I walk to the corner store to pick up something I’m not paying a line item for the logistics that delivered that item from a factory in China, nor a line item for the rent to keep that item s…
Offering free shipping is not a problem. The problem is that mandating your suppliers subsidize free shipping and don't sell for cheaper prices elsewhere is blatantly anticompetitive, and has the effect of raising consumer prices on non-Amazon markets.
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.
Amazon marketplace, AWS, Whole Foods, Twitch, Fulfillment by Amazon, and maybe Amazon Studios could all be separate companies. I think Amazon marketplace would also be forced to end some practices like not allowing sellers to have lower prices elsewhere.
And Amazon Studios is do successful it must be broken up.
Not to mention if AWS was broken up from Amazon smaller competitors could come in an offer cloud services distributed world wide at scale.
Have you really thought about how useless these suggestions are?
An excerpt from: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/ Amazon binds its sellers over to something called Most Favored Nation status. That means that sellers can't offer their goods more cheaply than they do on Amazon – even if it costs them (lots) less to sell in Target or direct from their websites. This means that every time a seller adds a dollar to their Amazon sale price, they have to add a dollar to…
It is extremely common for manufacturers to set a minimum advertised price (MAP) on the products they sell to retailers. This is done to keep the cost of, say, luxury goods above a certain value, or to ensure that even if demand falls off for a product, the product is sold from official channels at a price point that covers the raw-materials-plus-labor cost so the manufacturer isn't fundamentally selling at a loss. These agreements are generally enforced by both contract and tit-for-tat... Sometimes there are contractually-encoded penalties for going under-MAP, but sometimes the agreement is more "off the books..." If Amazon decides those Gucci purses are just taking up warehouse space and slashes their price to clear them, they can do that... If they don't want to have any Gucci purses to sell next year through official channels.
Why is this behavior legal for manufacturers but maybe not for Amazon? I can see no other reason than the law is path-dependent and arbitrary. "Fair trade" is a concept we invent as we go.
(Incidentally... As a consumer, it's useful to remember MAP exists when you hear whispers of "don't buy from unauthorized resellers." Sometimes the goods you get from those channels are shady, but sometimes they're exactly the same as the official-goods channels, shoveled into the back channel by an official retailer to clear warehouse space and reported to the manufacturer as 'damaged, lost' to preserve the MAP kayfabe).
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They can say "thanks to all my supporters". it's just fallacy to think the creator actually cares. it's a simple copy&paste from a list from their patreon (or whatever) to the text editor of their editing software. it's even less if they aren't even the ones doing the editing. sure, they all say "we love our supporters". it's just like people that donate to NPR so they can have their names read out over the air. how…
> They can say "thanks to all my supporters". it's just fallacy to think the creator actually cares. How deeply cynical and also, besides the point; even if you believe all creators don't give a shit (I believe many do), people still like being thanked. I mean, clearly you don't ...