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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”

#521

Post by granzymes »

Guvante wrote: post #518
londons_explore wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon responds that it is within its rights to not promote uncompetitive offers Sounds to me like Amazon has found a loophole in the law. It agrees to list anything for sale, with no anti competitive conditions, but then only recommends customers buy things that it believes are in the customers best interests. The FTC will struggle to argue that is illegal. Amazon can't be compelled to recommend stuff. (free speec…

Say Amazon offers three items all equivalent: one is priced at $9 and two are priced at $9.50 all are Prime. If the vendor for the $9 offers it for $8.50 elsewhere and Amazon starts focusing on a $9.50 offer is that "better for the consumer"? If the $9 doesn't exist and there are two vendors at the $9.50 price and one has a higher review history but offers it lower elsewhere is Amazon making things better by focusing…

The "buy box" is a product-level feature, not a seller-level feature. On any given product page, there may be multiple sellers with offers (one for $9, two for $9.50). The $9 offer would be prominently displayed in the buy box and the other two would be in the "other offers" section.

If another site starts selling the same product for $8.50 (regardless of who the seller is), Amazon may hide the buy box and put all the offers in the "other offers" section to avoid advertising an offer that isn't the best price available online.

Consumers price compare across sites, and Amazon wants to maintain its reputation for low prices (and in truly egregious cases prevent sellers on Amazon from price gouging).

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

#522

Post by AnthonyMouse »

kimbernator wrote: post #219
EGreg wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's trivial to create a website (frontend and backend) that offers similar functionality to Amazon. There's nothing special about their software platform. You can't open-source marketing and the insane delivery network Amazon has. Those, among other things, are the reason they are successful. They could release all of their software completely open source and literally nothing would change.

You're talking about the infrastructure for a specific seller, which in itself is by no means trivial.

What you want here is an open source replacement for Amazon's product search that will find products from multiple independent sellers. The hard part is probably how to curate it; you want to allow legitimate small sellers without allowing the thing to be filled with scams. But Amazon hasn't done a very good job here either, so maybe it's not a high bar.

And then a payments system which is something in the nature of GNU Taler.

Amazon's logistics is an advantage, but is it an advantage that can overcome the need to pay them a vig instead of having the product shipped directly from the manufacturer? Lots of people willing to wait a week for shipping if the price is 10% lower.

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

#523

Post by scarface_74 »

Prickle wrote: post #519
scarface_74 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? That’s your example? Everyone and their mother has a video conferencing solution and the idea has been around as something to aspire to since the 60s with the Jetsons . Do you agree with the look and feel lawsuit that Apple had against MS? Or think that Roku, Amazon, Google , etc did something untoward because they came after Apple with set top boxes?

Fortunately or unfortunately, that is something that is easy to research. ie: Amazon Basics https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/amazon-copied-produ... > thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters – including emails, strategy papers and business plans – show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India,…

Again have you heard of the Kirkland’s brand? Have you been to a CVS and seen the knockoffs? Literally every single major retailer has house brands that compete with third parties.

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

#524

Post by danielmarkbruce »

_uhtu wrote: post #502
mountainofdeath wrote: post #456

Much of what Amazon does is what other retailers already do. Amazon just does it more overtly and with smaller businesses. In fact, various aspects of this where pioneered by WalMart and Costco. 1. WalMart determines the expected product and expected price and tells vendors to take it or leave it. The agreement often has a stipulation that the same product can never be cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as Wal…

I hate that every discussion of reigning in abusive companies has to come with 1000 comments about how other companies are also being abusive, which should apparently make us just wave the white flag. Nah, let's deal with all the monopolies, and Amazon is a good place to start since like you said, they are just incredibly blatant.

"all the monopolies"

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

#525

Post by hiatus »

j-bos wrote: post #501
pierat wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not the only thing I caught, at least with Ebay. During the pandemic, I decided to sell a bunch of a component I had stockpiled. (Im not a scalper. I got the parts when my dad died.). I put them for sale with $100 minimum, auction. They ended up selling for $300. I was definitely happy.... until Ebay refused to send me my money, and instead demanded access to a bank account, after the sale was complete. Fuck th…

Isn't that open and shut fraud on the part of ebay?

How is that fraud? Ebay is brokering a deal between two parties. It doesn't seem inherently fraudulent to offer differing prices to each party.

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

#526

Post by [deleted] »

fallingknife wrote: post #520
_uhtu wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate that every discussion of reigning in abusive companies has to come with 1000 comments about how other companies are also being abusive, which should apparently make us just wave the white flag. Nah, let's deal with all the monopolies, and Amazon is a good place to start since like you said, they are just incredibly blatant.

It's a very strong argument to say that the practice currently being pursued by the FTC has been a long standing and generally accepted as legal practice in the retail industry. The fact that they are going after Amazon for this, but have not ever gone after anybody else who has been doing it for decades leads me to the conclusion that this is not about the actual trade practice it claims to be about, but rather a po…

[deleted]

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

#527

Post by mycologos »

_uhtu wrote: post #502
mountainofdeath wrote: post #456

Much of what Amazon does is what other retailers already do. Amazon just does it more overtly and with smaller businesses. In fact, various aspects of this where pioneered by WalMart and Costco. 1. WalMart determines the expected product and expected price and tells vendors to take it or leave it. The agreement often has a stipulation that the same product can never be cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as Wal…

I hate that every discussion of reigning in abusive companies has to come with 1000 comments about how other companies are also being abusive, which should apparently make us just wave the white flag. Nah, let's deal with all the monopolies, and Amazon is a good place to start since like you said, they are just incredibly blatant.

In what sense is Costco an "abusive" company? They squeeze their suppliers, but their suppliers legitimately have other options. I'm not aware of any market what Costco is the only game in town.

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

#528

Post by darkarmani »

mountainofdeath wrote: post #456

Much of what Amazon does is what other retailers already do. Amazon just does it more overtly and with smaller businesses. In fact, various aspects of this where pioneered by WalMart and Costco. 1. WalMart determines the expected product and expected price and tells vendors to take it or leave it. The agreement often has a stipulation that the same product can never be cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as Wal…

Isn't that totally different? I thought brick and mortar stores actually buy inventory (or commit to buy orders in this age of just-in-time) where Amazon is just the middleman connecting buyers and sellers and charging fees on both ends.

If Amazon wants to commit to certain sizes of orders, I'm sure the vendors will be happy with contractual price setting.

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

#529

Post by EGreg »

pierat wrote: post #413
EGreg wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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…

Thanks for un-flagging. How does one become an admin on this site, anyway? I've been active since 2008 but still get dinged for stuff, not sure for what in advance.

Yep, I think we are in agreement. My point is that for many decades, the government was barely able to make the prices drop. And then open protocols like VoIP did it in a couple years.

I am a libertarian and believe that good open-source software and open protocols cause the centralized services to face a free market of incumbents. Much of the vertically integrated systems can be unbundled.

Another great example is how the Web (HTTP was the open protocol) disrupted AOL, MSN, CompuServe etc. Or how Wikipedia disrupted Britannica and Encarta. How Apache and NGiNX disrupted IIS. And so on.

Basically, we need standardized, open protocols. Maybe one day OpenStreetMap and Mastodon and BlueSky will disrupt their centralized alternatives. In any case, the first step is to have open source software and federation. I'm not saying it's the only thing that needs to happen, but FBA and many other services can be done "sharded" per-product. We can do the same for other marketplaces, like Uber, Fiverr, etc.

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

#530

Post by jjk166 »

lozenge wrote: post #484
putlake wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good point and your comment below ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37768419 ) highlights it well. What people don't realize is that this is in the interest of the consumer. I used to work at Amazon (although not on any of these teams) so that's probably why I know that "see all buying options" means the price is not competitive. As a consumer I value this. Amazon scours the web to make sure their prod…

How does an extra click help the customer? Unless the customer used to work at Amazon and specifically knows that "see all buying options" means "scour the internet to find a better price, it should be easy this time".

They aren't hiding the better priced items behind an extra click, they are hiding the worse priced items. If you buy something listed in the "see all buying options" it means that you are spending more than you have to, as you will likely be able to find it for less elsewhere, whereas the normally presented items are the ones Amazon is selling for the same or less than elsewhere.
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