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Amazon documents reveal company’s strategy to dodge India’s regulators

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon documents reveal company’s strategy to dodge India’s regulators

#31

Post by random5634 »

kmeisthax wrote: post #11

I'm starting to think the reason why tech companies are so well-valued is purely due to regulatory evasion skills and a dash of political engineering. Effectively, every tech company has been given a pass on something . Facebook doesn't have to worry about defamation lawsuits. Google doesn't have to worry (as much) about copyright. Amazon built it's business on evading sales tax. Uber broke the back of your local cit…

At least locally, breaking the taxi medallion cartel was a godsend if you lived in a poorer part of time / needed to get places on a weekend.

There had to have been some deals on backend to keep things the way they were - insane shortages of vehicles on weekends and no service to minority areas - with Uber you can get dropped and picked up most places I've found even dicey ones.

Re: Amazon documents reveal company’s strategy to dodge India’s regulators

#32

Post by KorematsuFred »

suyash wrote: post #2

Amazon being shady with government what's new. It's a monopoly and only care about itself.

I am not sure why Amazon should care about anyone other than itself. To make profits though they have to serve an ordinary blok like me.

Re: Amazon documents reveal company’s strategy to dodge India’s regulators

#33

Post by missedthecue »

EricE wrote: post #27
missedthecue wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most theft in USA is wage theft by employers" This is something I hear repeated ad infinitum on the net, but has a calculation ever been done the other way? That is, workers stealing from employers by deliberately clocking out early/late, or by goofing off on HN while on the clock. I would hazard a guess that this number is an order of magnitude greater than seedy business owners short changing their staff.

It's easy to demonize groups you aren't a part of.

I make $15/hr

which group am I not a part of?

Re: Amazon documents reveal company’s strategy to dodge India’s regulators

#34

Post by KorematsuFred »

suyash wrote: post #2

Amazon being shady with government what's new. It's a monopoly and only care about itself.

There is absolutely no evidence that Amazon is a monopoly in India, Flipkart is their main competitor and e-commerce is one of the hottest markets in India we increasing competition from all sides. There is no evidence that Amazon will make any profits either from India for foreseeable future.

Indian people should ask why Indian government is creating laws that need "evasion", that too from a massively successful, well respected and very innovative company, Amazon wants to invest in India and India needs to change its laws if needed to welcome more investment and more competition.

Perhaps it is the indian government that is wrong here?

Re: Amazon documents reveal company’s strategy to dodge India’s regulators

#35

Post by yorwba »

neither_color wrote: post #7
newbie578 wrote: post #4

It disturbs me that with each day, it seems like the Great Chinese Firewall was a good solution. You keep out the foreign competition letting internal competition foster and you stop a capital drain. Imagine if the EU had it’s own Alibaba, Baidu or WeChat... That is a lot of taxpaying money...

I wonder about this. China has its own app ecosystem, as does Russia. India is pushing towards having its own as well. What about Europe? Is it harder because you have to localize to so many languages?

It's not localization that's stopping European companies from taking over the entire EU market, it's competition from other companies.

If a French company wants to expand into the Spanish market, they can localize their app all they want; if their prospective customers in Spain are already using a different app that works just as well, they're going to have a hard time convincing them to switch.

The same dynamic also applies within countries, where two interchangeable apps might dominate in different areas or demographics of the same country, without either able to gain significant market share from the other, but it's a bit rarer because of network effects, where people start using an app because they know someone else using it and the app with the most users grows the fastest, eclipsing the competition.

Cross-border network effects in Europe are much weaker than within countries, and not much stronger than between European and non-European countries, so if a company manages to dominate their niche across all of Europe, they'll probably also win in much of the rest of the world.

Re: Amazon documents reveal company’s strategy to dodge India’s regulators

#36

Post by missedthecue »

ska wrote: post #26
missedthecue wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most theft in USA is wage theft by employers" This is something I hear repeated ad infinitum on the net, but has a calculation ever been done the other way? That is, workers stealing from employers by deliberately clocking out early/late, or by goofing off on HN while on the clock. I would hazard a guess that this number is an order of magnitude greater than seedy business owners short changing their staff.

> but has a calculation ever been done the other way? The usual answer to something that is both an obvious question and clearly impactful is "yes, extensively". Which is separate from the question of how well the research has been done of course (in either direction). > I would hazard a guess that this number is an order of magnitude greater than seedy business owners short changing their staff. What broad data are…

Well there doesn't seem to be much data, hence my original comment. My assumptions are based primarily on my own anecdotal observation. I work a relatively low wage job with a lot of relatively low wage coworkers. Most of them make a deliberate effort every day to do as little work as possible, to the point that it occurred to me that they might be engaging in more effort than if they just did their jobs anyway.

I'm not minimizing wage theft. It's a real issue. I'm just casting some doubt on the claim that it's the biggest form of theft by bringing light to a viewpoint most people haven't even ever considered.

Re: Amazon documents reveal company’s strategy to dodge India’s regulators

#37

Post by dexen »

kmeisthax wrote: post #11

I'm starting to think the reason why tech companies are so well-valued is purely due to regulatory evasion skills and a dash of political engineering. Effectively, every tech company has been given a pass on something . Facebook doesn't have to worry about defamation lawsuits. Google doesn't have to worry (as much) about copyright. Amazon built it's business on evading sales tax. Uber broke the back of your local cit…

>defamation lawsuits

>copyright

>local city's taxi medallion scheme

Arguably the three areas of law where special protections & privilleges got expended so far, repeatedly and over decades, as to create ample opportunity for easy arbitration. Especially in case of copyright and taxi medallions, mafia-like structures were created through very one-sided markets; the only distinction from mafia being that those were gradually introduced through layers upon layers of legislation.

The fault, if any, lays with the legislators. The tangible result of tech businesses is cheaper music for the consumers and cheaper transportation for the consumers.

>special protections for local businesses online

Good luck with that./s France also tried similar legislation, targeted specifically at extracting more tax revenue from Amazon under the guise of "protecting local bookstores". That's neither moral nor productive.

Re: Amazon documents reveal company’s strategy to dodge India’s regulators

#38

Post by nerbert »

KorematsuFred wrote: post #30
kmeisthax wrote: post #11

I'm starting to think the reason why tech companies are so well-valued is purely due to regulatory evasion skills and a dash of political engineering. Effectively, every tech company has been given a pass on something . Facebook doesn't have to worry about defamation lawsuits. Google doesn't have to worry (as much) about copyright. Amazon built it's business on evading sales tax. Uber broke the back of your local cit…

> regulatory evasion skills You will be surprised to know that from your corner store florist to Walmart and from Bank of America to your child's babysitter everyone is obstructed by regulators of all kinds and to some or large extent all businesses are successful because they have learned how to evade government regulation. I remember a lecture by Aetna CEO who said the only competitive advantage they have over comp…

Somalia must be so nice without all these regulations. A godsend for all these business!

Re: Amazon documents reveal company’s strategy to dodge India’s regulators

#39

Post by fallingknife »

kmeisthax wrote: post #11

I'm starting to think the reason why tech companies are so well-valued is purely due to regulatory evasion skills and a dash of political engineering. Effectively, every tech company has been given a pass on something . Facebook doesn't have to worry about defamation lawsuits. Google doesn't have to worry (as much) about copyright. Amazon built it's business on evading sales tax. Uber broke the back of your local cit…

FB - Congress passed a law (before FB existed) exempting all companies that post user generated content. You may not like this law, but FB is not "evading" anything, and it is not a competitive advantage because section 230 applies to all companies in the industry.

Google - How does Google not have to worry about copyright? What exactly is their evasive behavior here?

Amazon - Until the rules changed in 2018, Amazon was following the same tax treatment that existed for mail order catalog sales decades prior to Amazon's existence. These same rules applied to other online retailers as well. They are not "evading" anything. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court...

Uber - OK you have a point here. I'm glad they did it, but that doesn't change the fact that they did evade regulations.

Re: Amazon documents reveal company’s strategy to dodge India’s regulators

#40

Post by 908B64B197 »

kmeisthax wrote: post #11

I'm starting to think the reason why tech companies are so well-valued is purely due to regulatory evasion skills and a dash of political engineering. Effectively, every tech company has been given a pass on something . Facebook doesn't have to worry about defamation lawsuits. Google doesn't have to worry (as much) about copyright. Amazon built it's business on evading sales tax. Uber broke the back of your local cit…

> Uber broke the back of your local city's taxi medallion scheme.

Posted it in an other thread [0] but do we really want to go back to the medallion system? Pre-Uber, either the driver rented the car to a middleman who rented the medallion from a rich owner, or said owner was selling and financing (most banks won't touch these medallions!) a medallion at a ridiculous interest rate to a driver that planned to use it as his retirement savings (an extremely volatile asset and not very liquid).

The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber brought a breeze of fresh air: Someone could simply buy a car, calculate the depreciation and it's value on the market (since unlike medallions cars are relatively liquid assets!) do rideshare and calculate their profits or loss. They can get out of the game at anytime, and they know exactly how much they are going to get for the car they have should they sell it.

And I'm not even touching the usual pain points and often discriminatory practices of medallion drivers (refusing card payments, refusing rides to non-white passengers and to non-white neighborhoods...).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24225648

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