Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the time or place for whataboutism
Why not? If it’s good enough for the government, why isn’t it good enough for the company they are going after?
It’s bad for both. But this thread is specifically about Amazon.
The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
411–420 of 653 posts
Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, if all you care about is money, then you can already go on Amazon and choose alternate vendors that are available at a lower price with slower shipping.
So you don't even know what the article is discussing. Amazon is killing competition and increasing costs to consumers.
I happen to know exactly what I’m talking about - you right now can look for an item on Amazon and see “this product is available at a lower price with ”
You right now can set up a site on Shopify and sell your goods.
If you are selling a differentiate product instead of cheap crap imported (or drop shipped) from China, you can create demand without going through Amazon.
For instance, I was specifically looking for Samsonite zipper less luggage because I trusted that brand and it wasn’t available on Amazon. They chose not to sell on Amazon and I bought it directly
Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a classic programmer response. The problem is not Amazon's software, it's their marketing, distribution network, huge audience that searches for products exclusively via Amazon, "free" and very fast Prime deliveries, etc. That doesn't all happen via simply open sourcing some code.
[flagged]
I vouched for this and un-flagged it.
I find most of your content here to not have any good follow-through.
Amazon isn't just some software on a few servers. It's a whole vertical enterprise. Suggesting that some front-end and back-end servers can take the place of warehouses, delivery people, fleets of machines (served by AWS no less), payment companies, 3rd party billing is just laughable, and shows the naivete of a sw engineer.
However, that last paragraph is terrible and absolutely true...
> Otherwise, at best, you are just reduced to begging Daddy Government to force these corporations to break up. How well did that work for Ma Bell? The pieces were still a cartel, still charged $3 a minute. What the government couldn't do in a decade, open source technology and open protocols did in a few short years ... VoIP dropped the price to practically nothing. Now we have videoconferencing all over the world. Because once we decoupled the software (AOL, MSN, etc.) from the infrastructure via open protocols, the infra providers became a dumb pipes competing in a free market.
I remember Ma Bell. Charged stupid prices for long distance, but was a good service. And then, the splitup happened. Did we get better services? Nope. We just got dozens of smaller monopolies all engaging in the EXACT SAME SCAMS that Ma Bell was broken up for.
It was when we started pushing data around and got away from POTS lines did we finally break the stranglehold of the baby bells. Even DSL has been basically thrown away, given how little the RBOCs dont want to advance and grow. Monopolies are like that.
Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
#414This 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 “hidden tax” described in the article is to sellers, not consumers. Free shipping is subsidy for consumers that costs Amazon billions of dollars. I have personally never seen what you’re describing.
this is pretty common from what I have seen. especially with books.
Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's one of the examples that the FTC cites in its complaint (at page 27): https://www.amazon.com/Pilot-Retractable-Rollerball-Extra-Re... Compare it to this listing for a very similar product: https://www.amazon.com/Pilot-Retractable-Rollerball-Ultra-0-... You'll see that in the FTC's example, you need to click to see more buying details and that at the time of this comment the lowest price is $14.28 with free shi…
Thanks! I had misunderstood what “buy box” is As a consumer I definitely avoid products with no buy box. I thought it was only related to Amazon fulfillment (which in turn I use as a proxy for being likely to receive the product on time and undamaged)
That's funny. I _only_ buy things from Amazon that are not shipped by Amazon.
Their logistics are utter garbage for me - part of it is an urban setting with nowhere to leave things, part of it is that they don't give a shit, and leave things.
Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, here's a real example. About a decade ago there was a simple video conferencing system called Nautilus. A simple LCD screen that let you call other people with the device and talk to them, not having to bother with computers or smartphones. The sort of thing that is good for talking with elderly relatives who may not be very computer or phone savvy. I bought one (from Amazon) for myself and my elderly parents.…
“A simple LCD screen that let you call other people with the device and talk to them” sounds like a commoditized product to me.
Yes, anyone here can go out and find an ODM from China to anufacturer them, send a custom version of AOSP to the ODM, slap their brand on it and sell it on Amazon.
Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fail to see why apple should be split. Nobody forces people to buy macs, very few do, and as for iPhones, there are alternatives and apple doesn’t have a monopoly over the phone industry. You can very well use icloud on other OSes too.
Apple doesn't even hide the tax. The shit they get to pull with safari is beyond IE level - they straight up don't allow alternative browsers (beyond WebKit) on 50% of mobile market.
Not for long (* insert EU flag here *)
Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Instacart has about an 80% accuracy rate IME. Which is pretty bad…
I use Target for many things now, they also have free shipping and usually lower prices than Amazon
Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, which is why searching "most favored nation clause" turns up legal advice on how to set that up in a good way. Note, there is still a valid question on whether or not companies with enough exposure should be held to higher standards. Consider, we hold pro players to tighter requirements than we do local leagues. They both have basically the same rules, of course, but not fully identical. And enforcement is, of c…
The US is strong on the doctrine that the law applies equally to people (legal entities) regardless of size / market cap. I don't think we'll ever see something like the EU's law that targets only large internet companies. It might even not fly on equal protection grounds. I think that in either Finland or Iceland people receive traffic fines that are a percentage of their income. They would never fly in the US.
The US has a lot of laws that apply differently based on a company's size... the Civil Rights Act, FMLA, GINA, PDA, ACA, etc.
Maybe the US doesn't have a lot of laws that specifically target large organizations, but they have a ton that specifically exempt small ones.
Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
#420I never understood why Walmart bought jet.com, but that was extremely good for Amazon. It's not really possible for the FTC to unwind that approval without suing amazon though, right?