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Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

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Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#611

Post by kube-system »

ceejayoz wrote: post #602
kube-system wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. The question I am alluding to is: can someone defraud their own computer? Maybe it is possible, but the consequences to answering 'yes' to this is pretty scary.

If I buy my spouse a phone, and secretly bug it, I'm still violating wiretap laws, even if it's technically mine. If I'm renting an apartment, my landlord can't install a camera in the bathroom, even if they're the owner of the building. Ownership doesn't change the fact that the law says "exceeds authorized access". Amazon agrees to only access the computer I'm renting from them in very specific scenarios. If they v…

Neither of your two examples have anything to do with the CFAA.

> Amazon agrees to only access the computer I'm renting from them in very specific scenarios.

AWS provides compute services, they do not rent computers. They make this clear in their terms.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#612

Post by [deleted] »

ianmcgowan wrote: post #563
yojo wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common arbitrage tactic. Seller carries no inventory, lists multiple products on eBay for slightly higher than the Amazon price, and buys/ships from Amazon if anyone buys the eBay listing.

This happened to me, payed $110 for a ski jacket, get an amazon box and lookup the price on amazon - $80. I had to applaud the eBay seller for their hustle..

[deleted]

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#613

Post by p1mrx »

yojo wrote: post #545
julianlam wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Next time you want to buy something from Amazon, I would encourage you to find the seller's website directly or find them on eBay. eBay charges less seller fees and is not in the business of selling products directly. Last time I bought an item off eBay, it arrived shipped via Amazon Prime. Pretty sure the seller just bought it off Amazon and shipped it to my house... it was a weird turn of events. It wasn't a bran…

This is a common arbitrage tactic. Seller carries no inventory, lists multiple products on eBay for slightly higher than the Amazon price, and buys/ships from Amazon if anyone buys the eBay listing.

This arbitrage is also good for the buyer, if they don't have an Amazon Prime account.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#614

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

partiallypro wrote: post #522
alaskamiller wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Shopify you don't pay ~20% sales commission to Amazon per se, but you sure as heck will end up paying for that if not more to Facebook. Where by FB has no direct incentive, yet. It could be a FB Marketplace PM team someone has already copied Shopify outright and is just waiting for the right time to roll that out to all FB user worldwide. With Amazon Marketplace the strategy has always been to convert customers…

I think Shopify should experiment with a centralized market place where stores can opt in. If you opt in, your store items are listed in a central location searchable in at single point, just like Amazon. Your item listing in the central market place merely directs you to YOUR branded store, allowing you to check out, and see your other products. That solves a huge problem of visibility that Amazon has mastered.

I’m not sure it would be easy. Large hosting platforms like GoDaddy, Wix or Squarespace could try this too, but it puts you inherently at odds with your own customers.

If I pay you to host my site where I sell my products, but you index me into the central sales portal in a bad way, I’ll be pissed. Kind of like restaurants on Seamless.

It comes off as deep rent seeking - instead of helping me succeed, which is the real mission of most of these types of companies, you’re creating an artificially scarce resource (visibility within your central sales index) where now I have to pay you an arbitrary tax just to compete.

Immediately makes customers want to leave.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#616

Post by rosywoozlechan »

shabuta wrote: post #615

Isn’t this what Walgreens, CVS or even Costco do? It’s called capitalism. When you want to invest, build and grow the channel then you can do the same. Not totally sure why people think this is unfair.

Well, there are antitrust laws, aren't there. So it's not that straight forward.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#617

Post by AgentME »

TimSchumann wrote: post #281
motoboi wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely no veil between the hypervisor and the guest virtual machines. Not in the EBS either. If they say they won't read your data, better trust them. If you don't, stay away from their datacenters. EDIT: fix typo.

> The is absolutely no veil between the hypervisor and the guest virtual machines. Not in the EBS either. This is 100% true. To do any useful computation on your data (read, what you're using all AWS for) they have to have 100% visibility into your data. > If they say they won't read your data, better trust them. If you don't, stay away from their datacenters. That's it, right there. All of this is based on Trust in…

If AWS used Intel SGX, then it would be possible for them to offer VMs that ran inside of a secure enclave that AWS could not peer into as long as Intel didn't give them a backdoor.

(Well, it seems like SGX is insecure right now with all of the CPU vulnerabilities, but in principle it may be fixed in a future generation and be well-suited for this.)

The fact that you wouldn't have to trust your host specifically could have a real decentralizing effect for cloud hosting: people would be able to run stuff on any cloud host without needing to trust them much. If you just wanted compute power and didn't care about strong uptime/connectivity, you could even safely rent cheap VMs on computers of random individuals.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#618

Post by kerkeslager »

darkerside wrote: post #345
TimSchumann wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The is absolutely no veil between the hypervisor and the guest virtual machines. Not in the EBS either. This is 100% true. To do any useful computation on your data (read, what you're using all AWS for) they have to have 100% visibility into your data. > If they say they won't read your data, better trust them. If you don't, stay away from their datacenters. That's it, right there. All of this is based on Trust in…

This is a similar level of trust that you give to banks not to seize your money, or to your bodyguard not to do you physical harm. Stealing data from a customer paying for hosting would be _very_ different, and much more scandalous, than identifying trends on a competitive marketplace and taking advantage of them by launching competing products.

> This is a similar level of trust that you give to banks not to seize your money, or to your bodyguard not to do you physical harm.

That's not true. I surely don't trust banks, but at least they're regulated to the point that they have to come up with some legal pretense for seizing my funds. A bodyguard is ostensibly a person who I've incentivized more than the competition to not harm me, and who I probably form a relationship with over time. None of these things are true of Amazon.

> Stealing data from a customer paying for hosting would be _very_ different, and much more scandalous, than identifying trends on a competitive marketplace and taking advantage of them by launching competing products.

What part of using data that you have on your competitors but they don't have on you, to sell competing products on a platform where you don't have to pay fees but they do, sounds like a competitive marketplace?

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#619

Post by three_seagrass »

dathinab wrote: post #510
motoboi wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely no veil between the hypervisor and the guest virtual machines. Not in the EBS either. If they say they won't read your data, better trust them. If you don't, stay away from their datacenters. EDIT: fix typo.

Which is why a company operating cloud computing should just do that and nothing else. (And a company producing phones should also just do that and not start competing on the app marked. etc.)

Except huge tech companies are incentivized to vertically integrate into selling their extra datacenter capacity. From there it's just an economies of scale game that a pure cloud company will have difficulty keeping up with (not saying it's impossible).

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#620

Post by tekknik »

qaq wrote: post #541
AmericanChopper wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you completely ignore scaling. The two things you simply cannot replicate at that scale are redundancy and operational resource. AWS has their entire operations team working at all hours of the day and night supporting their infrastructure. They also offer some of the most highly redundant services in the world. There is simply no way you could ever dream of replicating those service levels with such a small oper…

AWS has amazing marketing the truth of the matter is AWS Region has worse downtime than a single top tier DC. Mainly due to nightmarish complexity of their control layer. They had outages that lasted many hours in a row multiple times. You need to carefully separate marketing claims from operational reality and actual track record. When US East has major issues there is not enough spare capacity to spin up everything…

with high availability you don’t wait for an outage to spin up new resources, at that point it’s too late. it’s by definition not highly available and if you build infrastructure this way then you can’t blame AWS for an outage
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