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US antitrust case against Amazon to move forward

reuters.com

81–90 of 236 posts

Re: US antitrust case against Amazon to move forward

#81
post #4

I hope they include Amazon's practice of taking popular products on their storefront, making generic "Amazon Basics" versions, and selling them to undercut the popular options. Simultaneously owning a marketplace, approving who can and can't sell products on it, and then putting your own products on it to undercut other sellers is so scummy and muck rake-y. I hope they also include Amazon allowing thousands of Chines…

> I hope they include Amazon's practice of taking popular products on their storefront, making generic "Amazon Basics" versions, and selling them to undercut the popular options.

I guess you hate every grocery store ever then

Re: US antitrust case against Amazon to move forward

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I accept Khan's framing of, even though I haven't won any cases I have scared off potential mergers and that is a win. I think the US already leans too heavily on tying everything up in courts forever.

Don't fall for the Silicon Valley propaganda that things are on the downswing because the FTC is not allowing mergers or acquisitions. Plenty of both of those have happened this year. DirectTV is in the process of acquiring Dish Network and SlingTV which is one of the largest acquisitions of the year and should alone perish the thought that mergers aren't happening.

The claim that there are less mergers happening is from Khan not Silcon Valley.

“Sometimes, you know, the companies decide that they’re going to abandon the merger,” Khan said. Stahl asked if abandoning a merger amid the FTC’s scrutiny was a win, to which Khan said, “That’s right.” https://legal-mag.com/ftcs-lina-khan-defends-merger-and-acqu...

Re: US antitrust case against Amazon to move forward

#83
post #6

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.

I don't know if I accept Khan's framing of, even though I haven't won any cases I have scared off potential mergers and that is a win. I think the US already leans too heavily on tying everything up in courts forever.

I'd piss off a lot of investors I know by saying this – nerfing the Adobe and Figma acquisition seems excellent for consumer good.

3 years ago that would have just been rubber stamped.

Their work on non-tech stuff has probably been even more effective, too.

Re: US antitrust case against Amazon to move forward

#84
post #6

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.

What has she done that didn't fail or get shot down as political overreach? (not being sarcastic...i mean that i may have missed something inadvertently)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/never-seen-anything-like-...

Re: US antitrust case against Amazon to move forward

#85
post #49

Reminder that a mere 15 years ago, Walmart was the unfair monopolist whose market position rendered competition infeasible. Also unclear to me why "ecommerce" is a market unto itself that we should be concerned with level of concentration in, as opposed to simply a slice of the broader "retail" market (which is much less concentrated)

Amazon's "favoured nation" policy stipulates that vendors can't sell an item anywhere else for a lower price. This policy seems designed by them to put a moat between them and retail.

Re: US antitrust case against Amazon to move forward

#86
post #51
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News sites aren't just providing information: they're trading reporting for ad impressions.

Serious question: are paywalled news articles better at outlinking and do they have no ads?

No, not in my experience. They usually have less external ads but a lot of other cruft is still there.

Enshittification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) is getting so bad, I'd be willing to pay for sites that actually work. So far, paywall offers are just to remove external ads and that's only part of what I want. The rest of what I want is for the fucking site to actually work. For example, both Google and Amazon search have been seriously degraded and de-featured in recent years and it's been done very intentionally and systematically to optimize for their ad or sales revenue.

I suspect this degradation has crept deeper into their stacks than just at the top layer where it could be easily turned off with a flag and sold as a paywall upgrade.

Re: US antitrust case against Amazon to move forward

#87
post #64

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…

On the charge of just wanting to break up big companies because they're big, I plead not guilty on the virtue of this not being a crime. The whole point of breaking up large companies is because their size renders them unaccountable quazi-governments. To properly regulate them requires making the government even bigger with ever-more-complicated regulatory apparatus, compliance departments, administrative rulemaking, and "special understandings" (read: giving up) for the largest players.

I'll put it to you another way: if you want smaller government, you need smaller corporations, too.

> 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.

I would first argue that Google's unparalleled superiority in search is overblown. For one, there's ads in it. As Google's founders themselves stated, ads are a perverse incentive to ruin the search experience in favor of advertisers and I can point to several examples[0] in which this happened.

There are paid search engines that do not have advertising (e.g. Kagi) but they themselves have complained about the struggle that is competing with Google. For example, on iOS, there's only five default search engine options, there's no way to add a different search engine as default, and Google pays $$$ to Apple to be set to the default and for that search engine option to be buried in Settings. I don't see how that isn't anticompetitive.

On a technical level, Google has a supracompetitive advantage, too. A lot of websites have restrictive policies that forbid scraping except for Google and Bing. This means only those search engines can actually return results for those sites.

[0] Product ads in web search, every programming search query giving you four or five ads before the actual StackOverflow answer you're interested in, image search becoming a glorified product search with actual functionality being removed, Gemini

Re: US antitrust case against Amazon to move forward

#88
post #31

Anyone have an easy summary of what all was dismissed? This story is surprisingly light on details. (Did I just miss them?)

All of the federal counts move forward, some of the counts relating to specific states who joined the lawsuit are dismissed.

> Last week, before the order was unsealed, some of the initial coverage called it a “partial victory” for Amazon, but as it turns out, the portion of the ruling in which the company was victorious was relatively slim.

> The areas where the judge granted Amazon’s motion to dismiss were related to specific aspects of state claims, including elements of allegations brought by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Maryland. Eighteen states and one territory, Puerto Rico, joined the FTC in the lawsuit against Amazon.

https://www.geekwire.com/2024/unsealed-order-in-amazon-antit...

Re: US antitrust case against Amazon to move forward

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean you don't like having the choice between ZOSLRD-branded stuff and TUMACO-branded stuff, both of which have descriptions that look like someone put Mandarin Chinese through an LLM, because that's probably what they did?

Why is it so common for Chinese sellers on Amazon to have uppercase company names?

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 name, you just want an Amazon listing.

Coincidentally the majority of USPTO trademark submissions are literally just random strings of letters now for this reason.

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