Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws?

> 5 percent profit margin on Amazon’s own retail sales

Last I checked, 5 percent margin is still making a profit, and definitely doesn't fit the definition of dumping nor predatory pricing.

Part of the theory hinges on this:

> However, Sussman asserts in his paper, “Amazon utilizes existing loopholes in Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) disclosure regulations to exclude a significant portion of its expenses.”

> Amazon accomplishes this in part through using capital leases to purchase equipment and some of its 288 million square feet of office space. Instead of paying cash, Amazon borrows and finances these purchases over time. The leases don’t show up as expenses in Amazon’s free cash flow calculations, even though the equipment is listed as an asset. A 2017 Motley Fool report showed that, when you add in capital leases, Amazon’s 2017 cash flow was indeed over $1 billion in the red, although more recent numbers have bounced back.

Again though, there's nothing illegal about a firm using debt to finance expansion, nor is there anything illegal about a firm's net profit being negative, especially if there's positive cashflow from selling to consumers.

The whole article is nothing more than theories without any proof that Amazon is actually dumping products. And like I said, running thin margins isn't illegal. Undercutting your competition isn't illegal. Scaling out so your costs are less than your competition isn't illegal. You need to prove that a firm is actually dumping, it's not enough to think that they might be because they're out-competing you.

More from the article:

> As Sussman explains, if Amazon is recouping losses from a predatory pricing scheme by reducing its costs, the windfall profits aren’t being transferred to customers.

Reducing their costs to realize a profit literally is passing on the benefits to customers by continuing to sell at a low price.

If predatory pricing is effective, an algorithm can be taught, or learn to, exploit it if fed with the right data.

This, quite obviously, shouldn't change anything regarding the potential legality, as it's entirely self evident that a sufficiently powerful machine learning algorithm will exploit any patterns not expressly forbidden.

As always, the responsibility for following the laws, and making sure these extensions of our own agency we call machines also follow the same laws fall on whomever is making the machine act in their stead.

One can however be assured that several companies will argue otherwise, argue as if they were simply a victim of some sort. Which might be true in a sense. Victims of their own devices, both figuratively and almost literally at the same time.

This is actually kinda ironic, given that US is generally considered to be more on the side of the spectrum that strongly believes in the "invisible hand of the market" - and so it would make more sense for anti-trust to be defined in terms that would protect that hand from being "broken". And indeed, it was so defined originally, until this new standard came to be. Since then, we've seen steadily increasing market concentration [1], and the corresponding decline in competition, all while being assured that it's not harmful to us as consumers, and with some people even openly extolling the virtues of monopolies for consumers (e.g. Thiel).

To me, these sound very similar to the arguments that are used to justify "benevolent dictatorships", except here we're talking about economic power rather than political (and, of course, the two are not independent).

[1] https://concentrationcrisis.openmarketsinstitute.org/