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The FTC won the case against Google did they not? Which monopolies would you like to see them tackle?
They should probably just stop shaking down the American tech firms that are driving US economic growth.
Competition is the core tenant that makes capitalism beneficial to broader society. Consolidation over the past few decades has limited the capacity for firms to compete in many sectors. So I appreciate the sentiment of what the FTC is trying to do, but they really come across as amateurs bringing far too many lawsuits and often with weak legal reasoning/argumentation. In many of the cases they've brought there exist…
And if you haven't kept up this year, Chevron being overturned is showing that the SCOTUS is more than happy to reduce FTC interference.
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Didn’t they drop the two-day shipping promise a while back?
It's only two day in America? It's next day in Australia. And we haven't even had Amazon for long...
I suspect it isn’t next-day in, say, Broome. Last time I was in Hobart even it definitely wasn’t next or two-day shipping, lol.
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Selling on Amazon requires a registered trademark. If you're a random factory in Shenzhen you don't care about branding, you just want to be able to sell your stuff on Amazon, so you just put together random letters in the hope that your registration won't conflict with anything else. You don't want to have to deal with back-and-forth with USPTO, you don't care about having a meaningful, memorable, or interesting nam…
That explains the random names, but what's with the upper case lettering?
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I dont think anyone's arguing against generic alternatives of name brand items. The issue here is Amazon using up-and-coming and popular products as fodder for them to generic-ize and push to the top of results, essentially knee capping the original seller.
Does Walmart/CostCo/BestBuy/Kroger/etc not do this exact thing?
Meanwhle I will almost always get an AmazonBasics if it exists as a first result.
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I dont think anyone's arguing against generic alternatives of name brand items. The issue here is Amazon using up-and-coming and popular products as fodder for them to generic-ize and push to the top of results, essentially knee capping the original seller.
Yes, how dare they use their scale to make more cost-effective versions of popular things.
That's probably the more pressing issue.
More and more, antitrust is a means for people who dislike big, successful companies for no particular reason to attack them. On some level, the government is just throwing its weight around. The message is "don't forget who's really in charge." Consider all the "Lina Khan fans" you see on HN and elsewhere. They rarely articulate why the government should be suing these companies, which laws that company broke, or if…
Because it's not productive and against HN guidelines to say "read the article".
>Last year, the FTC alleged Amazon.com, which has 1 billion items in its online superstore, was using an algorithm that pushed up prices U.S. households paid by more than $1 billion. Amazon has said in court papers it stopped using the program in 2019.
Price fixing is generally an illegal tactic. I'm not a lawyer but there's plenty of legal dictionaries that laymen can understand on the whats, why's, and hows. So yes, the goverment should sue if a law is suspected of being broken.
>The Google suit was particularly egregious. There was no alternative to Google search because no one had built a better product for reasons that have nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior.
did you ignore the point where google was spending 250m a year to Apple to be the default search engine on IOS?
Please actually read the topics before complaining that there is no rationale behind it. You're doing the very thing you accuse others of doing. YOu're not providing an argument you're saying arguments don't exist and inserting a strawman.
>the government picked the exact moment when Google's search market share is seriously threatened to sue!
Googles been under scrutiny since pre-pandemic. There is no such thing as "good timing" for a lawsuit because they take years to bring to court, let alone to resolve.
I don't care who wins the election next month, Lina Khan needs to be kept as FTC chair. The FTC has been on a roll the past while.
Too early to call. At least initially, her FTC was incompetent to the point that M&A lawyers were urging companies to attempt mergers because shit that wouldn’t usually get through would get bungled in court. She was aggressive but incompetent. She appears to be improving. But the FTC chair isn’t an internship.
I think the attention she’s bringing to the issue will cause many people to ask why antitrust enforcement has to be so hard. Any company with more than $100B in revenue is a quasi-government, and damages fair competition merely through their existence. Instead of making enforcement rely on years-long court cases, we need more immediate ways to break up or regulate these companies, and what we have today is not enough. If her attempts make more people realize the current laws aren’t enough, that might be its own form of success.
Amazon currently does not honor its prime shipping agreement with all domestic customers and has no customer service path to get the issue resolved. In some places USPS is unreliable and Amazon insists on using it repeatedly, violating its own promise to customers. This suggests to me that Amazon faces no competitive pressure to deliver good customer service.
I can live with USPS but what made me actually cancel my Prime account was their use of On-Trac shipping in California. They literally missed every single time and had to come back the next day.
Amazon currently does not honor its prime shipping agreement with all domestic customers and has no customer service path to get the issue resolved. In some places USPS is unreliable and Amazon insists on using it repeatedly, violating its own promise to customers. This suggests to me that Amazon faces no competitive pressure to deliver good customer service.