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Where Warren’s Wrong

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Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#51

Post by Matticus_Rex »

mtmail wrote: post #44
cm2187 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually amazon is the one that I would say doesn't have a monopoly. It doesn't have a monopoly in the retail space (far from it), nor in the cloud hosting (let alone server hosting) business, nor in online streaming (music/tv). Google on the other hand has close to a monopoly on search (and browsers). Facebook on social medias.

"[Amazon] has captured 43 percent of all internet retail sales in the United States, with half of all online shopping searches starting on Amazon. In 2016, it had over $63 billion in revenue from online sales in the United States — or more than the next 10 top online retailers combined. It controls 74 percent of e-book sales, is the largest seller of clothes online and is set to soon become the biggest apparel retail…

"biggest" =/= "monopoly"

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#52

Post by steve76 »

The best thing we can do?

Lower the barrier to get rich.

Think of a reverse Amazon store. You go there, you do what your phone tells you, money is added to it.

Guaranteed job public utility

vs.

I need to apply for a building permit to launch my app public utility.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#53

Post by everdev »

mtmail wrote: post #44
cm2187 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually amazon is the one that I would say doesn't have a monopoly. It doesn't have a monopoly in the retail space (far from it), nor in the cloud hosting (let alone server hosting) business, nor in online streaming (music/tv). Google on the other hand has close to a monopoly on search (and browsers). Facebook on social medias.

"[Amazon] has captured 43 percent of all internet retail sales in the United States, with half of all online shopping searches starting on Amazon. In 2016, it had over $63 billion in revenue from online sales in the United States — or more than the next 10 top online retailers combined. It controls 74 percent of e-book sales, is the largest seller of clothes online and is set to soon become the biggest apparel retail…

43% is a massive market share but a monopoly by the definition of the word has near 100% control of a market.

I think the modern test is is it possible for someone to compete with Amazon? Costco and Wallmart certainly do. If you break up Amazon, I think online retail will just move to the next biggest player.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#54

Post by cromwellian »

mcguire wrote: post #6

" What is more striking is that, in retrospect, the core piece of the government’s case doesn’t make any sense: of course a browser should be bundled with an operating system; a new computer without a browser would be practically useless (for one, how do you install a browser?). Moreover, Apple, not without merit, argues that restricting rendering engines to the one that ships with the OS (all browsers on iOS have no…

> Integrating a browser engine with the core operating system increases security...how?

In particular, how process isolation and Just-In-Time compilers work. Since mobile phones are extremely resource constrained, there's a tradeoff between security and performance that is more difficult on mobile than on the desktop. That means the way things were sandboxed on mobile was different on the desktop.

For example, the ability to allocate memory that is both writable and executable, one of the features used by Javascript JITs, opens up a huge attack surface area. Apple basically solved this problem by making JavaScriptCore the only blessed Javascript engine able to do this, and for a long time, only Mobile Safari itself could leverage the JIT.

Granted, modern phones can relax this, but there's definitely benefits to controlling the entire stack. For example, some functions of the browser could leverage enclaves or enclave-like containers for privacy oriented calculations.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#55

Post by [deleted] »

mschuster91 wrote: post #41
cm2187 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually amazon is the one that I would say doesn't have a monopoly. It doesn't have a monopoly in the retail space (far from it), nor in the cloud hosting (let alone server hosting) business, nor in online streaming (music/tv). Google on the other hand has close to a monopoly on search (and browsers). Facebook on social medias.

> It doesn't have a monopoly in the retail space For vendors, the situation looks different - and Amazon certainly does abuse their position towards vendors often enough, e.g. with the AmazonBasics program where they take bestselling stuff, produce it at Amazon scales and then outprice the "competition".

[deleted]

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#56

Post by everdrive »

patrec wrote: post #42
Shivetya wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but the idea that Apple needs to be separated from the App store is ludicrous. If you don't like the App store don't buy Apple products. There are hundreds of other phones to choose from and some get equal or better reviews. It would be one thing if Apple was the only cell phone maker in existence but that is so far from the truth. Amazon and online purchases, again, there are so many choices that you never ev…

There are just two phone makers in existence: Google and Apple. If you care about privacy and security, there is just a single phone maker: Apple. The only difference between different brands of Google phones is how much additional insecurity and crap the notional manufacturer adds on top. Amazon has complete dominance over books in the US and are on their way to abolishing book ownership outright.

>are on their way to abolishing book ownership outright.

This is hyperbolic. There has been a resurgence in small bookstores, and Amazon sells quite a few physical books themselves.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#57

Post by criddell »

fcarraldo wrote: post #47
replicatorblog wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like the weakest part of the argument — Walmart, Kroger, Walgreens, Costco, and every other major retailer has a similar program. All use sales data to determine what sells best and copy it. I did this for a decade, designing store brand medical devices for all the major retailers. There are plenty of legitimate critiques of Amazon. The "private label" one is by far the weakest.

Walmart, Kroger, Walgreens and Costco are not marketplaces, they're retailers, and they have contracts with suppliers and pay distributors to purchase goods to resell to consumers. Amazon is a marketplace where any retailer can list their goods for sale. I believe Warren's argument is that Amazon is abusing their position as the marketplace platform owner by listing their own goods at prices that undercut marketplace…

Walmart.com is a marketplace.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#58

Post by cromwellian »

monster2control wrote: post #4

While I agree to some extend with the author, he too is making large leaps without truly backing them up. He's fighting over semantics. While Warren may be wrong in her history, she's not truly wrong in the results. Amazon does exactly what she says, Amazon sees a Marketplace item is selling really well, so they start to sell it too at or slightly cheaper. The reason people tend to use Google over Yelp as in his exam…

I'd say the reason there wasn't more browser competition is simply because browsers are hellishly complex pieces of software that are tremendously expensive to engineer. Look at how long it took from Netscape starting Mozilla to the first viable and competitive consumer version of Firefox.

Even Microsoft itself couldn't reboot its browser (Edge) and compete with Chrome. And Chrome wasn't even a from-scratch rewrite, it was a fork of WebKit, which was a fork of KHTML.

There's no money in the creation and sale of web browsers, and given the tremendous engineering complexity in making a modern one, I highly doubt there will be any more "from scratch" entrants into the market besides Firefox, simply due to the fact that there's no great money in it, even for Microsoft.

Is anyone could to rewrite Unix from scratch and not use the Linux kernel or GNU userland (or BSD userland)? It would be insane. At best, people can fork and replace small pieces, like a JIT, or the Kernel, or UI.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#59

Post by monkbent »

objektif wrote: post #30

I would take anything the tech industry and even tech focused journalists say about this topic with a grain of salt. It is very likely that they have a conflict of interest. Either they have shares or their jobs require not alienating big tech.

https://stratechery.com/about/#ethics

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#60

Post by crankylinuxuser »

gimmeThaBeet wrote: post #35

> the next generation of great American tech companies can flourish. To do that, we need to stop this generation of big tech companies from throwing around their political power to shape the rules in their favor and throwing around their economic power to snuff out or buy up every potential competitor. This is part I find interesting. If there is a difference between the titans of now vs old, its that they behave lik…

Its even uglier when the price these companies charge is "free"... But in actuality you pay with your data.

And I know of no human who would be able to accurately price access to parts or all of their data. "Its just data. How much am I really worth?", is a common refrain. And then, well, its freeeeee....

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