This doesn't seem to be the right tack. There's legitimate reasons to favor sellers that use your own logistics. Hard to see that as anti-competitive. Even harder to see why they picked this issue when there's seemingly many more blatant ones going on.
Not only that, I'm sure most customers PREFER sellers that use Amazon's logistics. I sure do. It's more trustworthy, you know the product exists at an amazon warehouse, faster shipping, etc.
I'm the total opposite. How can I trust Amazon if they aren't the ones selling me the merchandise? 3rd party sellers killed that website entirely for me.
I needed to buy creatine and the last place I would buy it would be Amazon because there are too many chinese counterfeits, and worse Amazon seems to wash their hands of any responsibility. I ultimately bought creatine from nootropicsdepot. I buy things directly from the manufacturer now or physically from Target.
Yep and their mixing sku-s has created a whole sub industry where everything that fails quality control ends up here too. They should be required to track what came from who, so if counterfeits are discovered the rest of the stock can be pulled. I don't see how much effort it would take to add a sticker barcode.
The cynic in me says it's because this way they can say "we tried" and not actually do anything.
Antitrust lawsuits died the day MS got a slap on the wrist, and we've been paying for it as a society ever since. I really doubt the authenticity of this effort, but I also lack the expertise to judge properly so maybe I shouldn't be so pessimistic.
I don't think it's the cynical take, the current FTC chair seriously believes that the FTC should be doing more antitrust enforcement and the paper that got her noticed specifically called out Amazon (IIRC the amazon/diapers.com conflict).
She runs into challenges because she has a somewhat novel theory of antitrust. This causes conflict between the long-standing staffers (who both want to win cases and seem to dislike the new direction) and with judges (who don't seem to be buying her theories).
Her theory of antitrust goes back 100+ years. It’s that there should be robust competition and when firms get too large and powerful they should be broken up.
The alternate theory is the novel one. That theory basically sums up to “no we shouldn’t” and also “after a few years in public service I am happy to announce I have taken a role at a large monopolistic company and can now afford a summer home.”
The current standard is "consumer harm" with lower prices considered per-se evidence to the contrary. The issue here is monopsony rather than monopoly because Amazon is fantastic for consumers but Terrible for sellers because there is effectively a single online market to sell in owned by Amazon.
My worry would be a feedback loop giving Amazon increasing dominance due to this effect, and would like to see both vertical integration and Monopsony more heavily scrutinized, but this lawsuit seems to target a feature with an objective benefit to consumers given Amazon's amazing shipping and return policy.
> Even harder to see why they picked this issue when there's seemingly many more blatant ones going on.
I know nothing about their thinking here, but very often when you see enforcement agencies focusing on something that seems like a lesser problem in the basket of problems, it's because they're selecting the specific point they feel they can win in court on.
What wins in court is related to what you can prove, not necessarily related to what the worst offense is.
I think her strategy is pretty plausible. They're abusing their position. I won't say it's slam dunk monopolism, but we've been on a decades-long trend of looser and looser regulation and I think it's high time the FTC takes a stand to actually tighten a bit. I'm not familiar enough with legal statute to say how strong their case will be, but it certainly feels like the kind of the thing they should be doing and I trust Lina Khan to have her ducks in a row. She wouldn't be teeing up a high profile case that doesn't have a high chance of success.
> There’s legitimate reasons to favor sellers that use your own logistics. Hard to see that as anti-competitive.
Whether or not there are also “legitimate reasons”, its not hard at all to see favoritism on a platform with market dominance conditioned on use of another service as leveraging dominance in one market to gain control of another.
There are good reasons for violating most rules. That's why we write laws; in order to make violating those rules more expensive, therefore not profitable.
It's not exculpating for a burglar to claim that a burglary was a really good choice for them at the time.
edit:
> There's legitimate reasons to favor sellers that use your own logistics. Hard to see that as anti-competitive.
These sentences bother me so much. The argument is about what is or is not legitimate, and you're not making an case, you're just giving a verdict. Why is it hard to see?
A lot of the beef with Amazon seems to be "welcome to retail". I don't think Walmart even has third-party logistics for its stores -- or if it does it's of the "hire contractors and squeeze them hard" variety.
Personally I've found the customer experience of non-FBA merchants on amazon is often pretty bad: long shipping times and weird return policies. This gets at a sort of core problem with this: where is the line between anticompetitive behavior and just "making good products". I was very happy when google did it's hotels thing, the hotel aggregators are by-and-large unpleasant. And as much as there was wailing and gnashing of teeth here about amp, when I was doing a mobile search I would preferentially click amp sites -- they tended to work much better.
Of course all of this depends on what specifically the FTC is arguing, and we won't see that until they actually file.
Amazon can have pro consumer policies (free shipping & returns. Easy return process) without predatory practices though. It would be silly for the FTC to argue that good consumer experience is anti-trust behavior.
What they could argue is about the myriad of ways that Amazon uses its market power to put others out of business or force them to sell (diapers.com comes to mind on this[0]).
Amazon's retail arm isn't the grounds of anti-trust action.
Their ownership of AWS, Twitch, MGM, Gaming studios, windfarms, lenders are problems. If they want to be an retail giant, that's fine, but they shouldn't be producing and selling games & movies as well. They need to pick a lane and spin off unrelated entities that only exist because of Amazon's dominance in retail.
Their expansion into all of these market segments make sense in isolation. Amazon builds a better service internally, then begins to offer it for sale to others. But at some point, they've crossed over into abusing their monopoly in one area to expand into another.
i.e. break it into IT infrastructure, logistics, marketplace, and manufacturing. I'd also break out payments. Amazon can stay just as it is, but it needs to be multiple companies negotiating the best deals with each other.
A big complaint I've seen in the past is AmazonBasics, where amazon copies successful products and sells them for slightly cheaper. This is identical to brands like Great Value (walmart), Up&Up (target), Nice (walgreens) and Safeway Select.
Similarly, I have seen a lot of complaints that amazon charges for ad space in the search, and you therefore need to pay to get out of page two. This, again, is widely practiced in retail. The cereal aisle doesn't look like it does because the store manager is making it up, general mills and post rent the space and decide how to arrange their sections. New retail products need to explicitly or implicitly pay for placement: either with cash or with free / discounted product.
Walmart has been working on their logistics. I haven't quite figured it out yet - most things in store they will just deliver from the store, ask for tip, etc. Some things are only available for 'shipping', but that shipping is often same day delivery, and it's apparent someone just brought it from the store. And some things are 1 day shipping, where it looks like they're moving items from a WM a couple hours away to your local store, then delivered as described above. In the latter two, tips are not even asked for.
I feel like they are up against a new lawsuit daily. First all the class actions regarding fake prime sales and hard to cancel subscriptions, now this.
Although this one I believe is more of an attempted power play by the FTC, the others not so much.
I hope they go after KDP (Kindle) exclusivity next. Authors put their content on Kindle Unlimited, then have to live with Amazon eating into their profit share. Amazon also has no problems rolling over entire subgenres with algorithmic tweaks, destroying them.
Has the FTC outlined what Amazon is actually doing in "rewarding" or "penalizing" 3p merchants? I see a reference to Amazon's "algorithm". Hazarding a guess, it would have to be either category listings or search results? Is there something else?
If so, this is some weak-sauce when it comes to anti-competitive behavior.
With Temu coming from China to compete with Amazon, and the US regulators going full anti-China recently, I'm really interested to see whether these actions against Amazon get pushback from the top of government, and ultimately get stalled.
China’s banning our tech companies and they’re regulating the shit out of their own. They do a lot of shit we shouldn’t but they’re dead on that tech companies should serve society instead of the other way around
eh, the US also bans Chinese tech companies too, i think the fear of data being used inappropriately is equally high on both parties. The US does have more international and larger corporations, so obviously in terms of number we have more banned.
We are not back in the trade war. We always IN the trade war. Look up how many things are banned in China while their companies like Tencent/Tiktok/ Aliexpress/Temu just do whatever they want here.
The question has and will always been, so what are you gonna do about it?
A lot of the anti-china stuff is coming from the top, the CHIPS act is a great example. I think taking down Amazon and maybe busting them up ala AT&T would be a feather in Biden's cap with the liberals and the right thing to do. Then they need to go after Google and Facebook.
> A lot of the anti-china stuff is coming from the top, the CHIPS act is a great example.
I mean... TSMC is based in Taiwan, and if China were ever to invade they'd have a vested interest in kneecapping American businesses that currently rely on that chip supply (AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm all come to mind) -- for any of a list of reasons ranging from turnabout over the whole Huawei thing to just the obvious incentive to turn that manufacturing capacity toward producing a domestic supply.
In that context, building up domestic suppliers of our own is just a reasonable precaution.
> I think taking down Amazon and maybe busting them up ala AT&T would be a feather in Biden's cap with the liberals and the right thing to do. Then they need to go after Google and Facebook.
But also yes, I'm with you on this wholeheartedly.
I'd further add, given we have a history of breaking up telecom companies specifically for amassing too much market power that you as a consumer to avoid them, that we should probably turn the same to most ISPs. Also that it's baffling that no one's gone after Apple over iMessage, what with the way it actively makes text chains worse the moment anyone involved isn't a customer of theirs.
I'm actually not convinced this is going to go very well. The FTC for the last few years has talked a big game, and hired people who have talked a big game; but the actual lawsuits have been pretty mediocre and occasionally even poorly thought through. An example lately is their battle with Microsoft to block the ActiVision acquisition which, the general consensus of observers seems to be, isn't going very well and the hope of the FTC getting their injunction is dwindling. Another example would be the FTC's recent failure to prevent Facebook's acquisition of Within.
The FTC shifted under Khan from a posture of "don't bring a case if it's not bulletproof" to one of "be willing to litigate even on things we might lose" to be less of a pushover. See discussion and quotes here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/technology/meta-vr-antitr...
I think this is probably wise even if they don't win much:
1) it'll set the boundaries of how courts interpret the current laws, which will inform if there are unpopular holes that could become part of political platforms going forward
2) it'll add that much uncertainty and "cost of doing business" legal expense to companies playing fast and loose in other novel ways because they've known they're unlikely to get challenged
Are you actually following the MS/Activision testimony? They've been getting absolutely crucified, there are multiple examples of blatantly illegal emails and discussions of anti-competitive behavior being introduced on the stand.
The only real question right now is if the judge whose son quite literally works for Microsoft (!!) will decide that laws don't matter, which has been the main issue with antitrust enforcement in the recent past.
Her son working for another Microsoft division isn't an issue and notably neither the FTC nor private plaintiffs whose case the judge previously dismissed even asked her to recuse.
I am amazed to see people defending AMZN in these threads. They are so obviously monopolistic with such a plethora of problems with the way the treat consumers, workers, businesses, and the planet. More power to the FTC -- just wish they had taken these actions sooner.
I also don't really get the desire to defend them even if you were a loyal fan. Outside of AWS, none of their services are good anymore and have deteriorated. The only reason people think Prime is even valuable is because of the quantity > quality overriding people's rational. Amazon (the storefront) has turned into Aliexpress but with the shoddiest random brands ever like XYGHY selling you a product they're dropshipping for a 300% markup. They've turned into the store where it's only worth using to get AmazonBasics from.
I might well be one of the very few people in the thread who can still benefit from prime shipping.
We have an Amazon prime depot about 10 minute walk from our house. The drivers can schedule their deliveries to us either to the beginning or end of their routes, and that shows: we get prime shipping for almost everything. In fact, trying to batch individual items into fewer deliveries is not necessarily even an option anymore. It's rare that I need the order in for next day, and I'd be happy to have the whole batch delivered in 2-3 days. But no, I get a small batch on next day, one item on day 2 and two more on day 3. There is no - or very rarely - option to select "all of these in one go, on day 3, please".
Then again, I live in UK, in the weird place that's both in London and in Kent at the same time. That said, when we do need next-day delivery, it tends to be available for about 50% of the time.
What does the "end of the route" look like for you? For me, along with the worsening reliability of prime, it's just getting later and later. When first moved into this address, deliveries were generally before 3. Slowly that became 5, then 7. Finally, to take the absolute piss this has become as late as 10pm, which is not what I call "next day" and at that point I don't really want it delivered at all.
Rarely much later than than after 7, usually between 14:00 and 17:00 in the afternoon. In a rather bizarre twist, maybe slightly less than half the time _before_ 14:30. Never before 09:45
I think we've had two deliveries after 20:00 in the past year.
I let my prime membership lapse last year and I barely notice the difference. I stopped shopping there as much and started queuing things up into batches to meet the free shipping without prime threshold. Now that threshold seems to be zero, I still get free shipping on everything. It takes a little bit longer, like 1-2 days, sometimes, that's it.
I don't think it's so much about defending AMZN as it is recognizing what a weak case the FTC chose. It's going to amount to a mere slap on the wrist for Amazon, in reality. This suit does nothing to limit the velocity Amazon has in entertainment, retail, payments, cloud and so on.
I don’t think I’m defending Amazon so much as noting that Amazon does not have a monopoly on retail or even e-commerce.
I don’t think issues should be picking sides so much as seeking the truth.
Amazon had 38% of online retail market share [0] and only 9% of total retail market share [1]. So I think it’s going to be hard to show antitrust violations without some price collusion.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power
I'd say Amazon has "significant and durable market power"
What method wouldn't be? Putting it to a committee would have similar problems. Writing it into a law would be too static.
Especially because the first part of determining marketshare and market power is determining the market. New markets happen all the time, with old markets dying out. Twenty years ago, smartphones wouldn't have been a market. Fifteen years ago: streaming services.
Like going back to your "Intel with x86", what is the market? x86_64 CPUs? Sure they have monopoly power. All CPUs? Now they don't have as much because they're competing with ARM too. Mobile phone CPUs? I don't think there's been a new Intel phone since the Asus Zenfone 2 (2015).
They are more rigorously enforcing laws against unfair practices, monopoly or not.
"Unfair methods of competition, the policy statement explains, are tactics that seek to gain an advantage while avoiding competing on the merits, and that tend to reduce competition in the market."
Translated from non incriminating corporate speak to plain English:
"We have to been seen doing something, the election cycle is fast approaching. What if we go after Comcast?"
"They gave a important senators son a no show job so they are off limits for the time being"
"Amazon?"
"Let me check, actually they haven't done much for us lately, let's shake them down, if they give my cousin a few million for consulting we give them a small fine, if not we give them the law"
Amazon has a near-monopoly at this point on online retail in the USA, mostly owing to their logistics network and ability to deliver so easily combined with the one stop shop advantage.
As a commentors above pointed out, online market share includes Airline sites, etc, and Delta alone is a top 5 online purchasing site. Show me what “Amazon had 38% of online retail market share” actually means. That they have 100% of 90 areas measured and 0% of airline ticket sales?
Being good at something does not make you a monopoly. They are not actively blocking other online retail platforms. This is not a statement to defend Amazon but the fact that I prefer Amazon for its features (like same day delivery) is just plain capitalism. The customers have a choice to buy from a retailer they prefer and the important thing is that I still have an option to choose where I make my purchases.
This exactly. I tried buying from other online retailers recently to support other businesses directly, and their websites are replete with what I would consider dark patterns. Things like listing 2-day shipping and then burying the fact that you'll get the item 2 days from when it ships but it will take them a month to process it. Seriously, this is a thing.
At least with Amazon I know I'm actually getting it in 2 days or they'll give me a refund (and often times still give me the product too).
Amazon also has dark patterns. I have accidentally signed up for Amazon Prime twice in the last year due to the way they practically force it under your cursor while you are checking out.
I do not want Amazon Prime because in my area (in southeastern Australia), it fails to meet its delivery promises about 95+% of the time, and when that happens, Amazon cancels the order on you half the time and sends it off to some distant pick-up point the other half. Regular Amazon just sends things by post, which is so much more reliable and convenient.
I strongly prefer using smaller online retailers. I have not found it very difficult to find ones that offer better and more honest service (not to mention lower prices) than Amazon. As far as I'm concerned, Amazon is for Kindle books, and occasionally the odd item I can't find anywhere else.
You don't need a monopoly to engage in anti-competitive behavior. Ffs. Antitrust isn't necessarily about monopolies. How is that so hard to understand?
Agree, (these are not the droids you are looking for). Look to Google, Meta, and the telecoms as they are the most eggregious and abuse their market position blatantly.
This antitrust action isn't about their retail sector though... I can only assume the many people acting without that understanding here didn't read the article.
Sure, but “online retail” is pretty clearly an overly broad market including separate segments between which there is no substitution effect, and there are a whole lot of segments within that where Amazon has majority (>50%) market share (safety & security, communications, home audio, portable audio, etc.)
Not that this is about retail, per se, anyway, except maybe in leveraging market position in retail as an aspect of the anticompetitive behavior regarding sellers planning on using their fulfillment services.
Remember the FTC and their laughably ill-prepared anti-trust lawsuit against then Facebook? They tried table-pounding instead of doing their homework to properly define the area of monopoly and got their case thrown out.
Amazon has been able to get away with a lot because for a long time their customer experience was fantastic. You could buy pretty much anything knowing it was the lowest price, get it in a day or two, and return it for pretty much any reason.
Over time the experience degraded because they encouraged cheaply copying popular products, and then they even did it themselves and competed with their sellers. And of course their anticompetitive practices have made things much worse for those sellers.
Did the USA ever even get AMZN paying their income tax, or is AMZN still stowing trillions offshore? Or am I confusing AAPL with AMZN? Hell they're probably both doing it.
A less well known area of concern with Amazon is the way it is now purchasing for its own business. It is actively cutting out local distributors in favour of direct deals with manufacturers. This is really squeezing those businesses.
Edit: this seems particularly monopolistic because it is using its own global logistics to undermine the supply chain to other retailers.
Because other retailers need the local distributors. If you knock them out of the market there is no local stockholder and you need to buy directly from the manufacturer (in a third country) yourself. A smaller company probably can't afford to buy in those kind of quantities.
In terms of direct evidence of what the FTC thinks, I don't know. But it's interesting that India had some anti-trust action against companies that both owned online meta-marketplaces and had shops selling in the same marketplace. The theory applies here in that Amazon operates logistics and online presence for a shops, but operates it's own shop with potential information from all the other sellers. Self preference, or selected partner preference may be an issue:
How about fake reviews? That's a whole industry deceiving people with Amazon's blessing. I can't even fathom the economic impact of the practice over the years.
And another one: Amazon Basics. Free market research with the data from your paying sellers, to then enter a market with a product you know will sell, in a position of dominance. Much like they do with open source in AWS.
They should get hit with billions, but one can only hope.
> Free market research with the data from your paying sellers, to then enter a market with a product you know will sell, in a position of dominance.
But these are the things that are pro-competitive. So now they make batteries. They're not putting Energizer out of business, they can still sell through Walmart or local convenience stores etc., and some customers still buy Energizer batteries on Amazon, but now customers have a new option for batteries from a well-known brand with lower prices. Obviously the competitors don't like this -- they're losing business to new competition -- but new competition is good.
Where you run into problems is where companies leverage a dominant market position in one area into abusive practices in another. So for example, if Amazon had a monopoly on retail, they could demand huge margins for reselling a competitor's batteries, or just stop carrying competing batteries and charge high prices for their own because customers have no other option.
But they have no such market power. If they tried to charge significantly more than competing retailers for basic commodities, customers would just buy them from whoever has the best price.
Compare this to, for example, mobile app stores where customers in practice have one store provided by the phone platform and if that store charges high margins or doesn't carry something they want, they have to buy a different device for hundreds of dollars, over a $1 app. Also, there are only two platforms of note so if you dislike any practice shared by both of them you're out of luck, whereas in an ordinary retail market there are a zillion competing retailers.
You described a perfect market scenario, where all players start on common ground and compete between them. Now imagine you have access to all the data from your competitors. Sales numbers, A/B testing on images and descriptions, keywords, etc. It might be good for customers, but it sure isn't ethical and I personally see it as being monopolistic in a way, as in "I'm copying you with your data and you know it, but can't leave my platform because there's no real alternative".
You don't have all the data from your competitors. You only have the data from your own system. And every retailer has the data from their own system. And the data has diminishing returns with scale. And some of the retailers will sell it to anyone who pays.
Moreover, what should businesses use to determine whether to enter a market or how to price their offerings? A dart board doesn't make for an efficient market. It sounds like you're objecting to someone other than the incumbents having access to the threshold amount of data needed to know whether it's worth entering their market.
If the existing competitors were already charging thin margins in a highly competitive market then Amazon could look at the data all they want but their conclusion would be that it makes no sense to enter that market. When that isn't the case, the "victims" of this practice are some other abusive conglomerates with sour grapes.
Fake reviews are a real mess in the amazon ecosystem.
I was trying to find an airfryer cookbook for one specific model, and they all seem to be auto-generated (chatgpt?) with nothing that is model-specifc.
And all the reviews appear to be auto-genereated as well. sigh.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 100.0 ms ] threadI needed to buy creatine and the last place I would buy it would be Amazon because there are too many chinese counterfeits, and worse Amazon seems to wash their hands of any responsibility. I ultimately bought creatine from nootropicsdepot. I buy things directly from the manufacturer now or physically from Target.
Antitrust lawsuits died the day MS got a slap on the wrist, and we've been paying for it as a society ever since. I really doubt the authenticity of this effort, but I also lack the expertise to judge properly so maybe I shouldn't be so pessimistic.
She runs into challenges because she has a somewhat novel theory of antitrust. This causes conflict between the long-standing staffers (who both want to win cases and seem to dislike the new direction) and with judges (who don't seem to be buying her theories).
The alternate theory is the novel one. That theory basically sums up to “no we shouldn’t” and also “after a few years in public service I am happy to announce I have taken a role at a large monopolistic company and can now afford a summer home.”
For more info read this book: https://mattstoller.com/
My worry would be a feedback loop giving Amazon increasing dominance due to this effect, and would like to see both vertical integration and Monopsony more heavily scrutinized, but this lawsuit seems to target a feature with an objective benefit to consumers given Amazon's amazing shipping and return policy.
That "slap on the wrist" was sufficient to prevent MS from owning the browser.
They were going to actually break the company apart into different divisions to stop the vertical monopoly, but instead that's just become standard.
I know nothing about their thinking here, but very often when you see enforcement agencies focusing on something that seems like a lesser problem in the basket of problems, it's because they're selecting the specific point they feel they can win in court on.
What wins in court is related to what you can prove, not necessarily related to what the worst offense is.
Whether or not there are also “legitimate reasons”, its not hard at all to see favoritism on a platform with market dominance conditioned on use of another service as leveraging dominance in one market to gain control of another.
It's not exculpating for a burglar to claim that a burglary was a really good choice for them at the time.
edit:
> There's legitimate reasons to favor sellers that use your own logistics. Hard to see that as anti-competitive.
These sentences bother me so much. The argument is about what is or is not legitimate, and you're not making an case, you're just giving a verdict. Why is it hard to see?
Personally I've found the customer experience of non-FBA merchants on amazon is often pretty bad: long shipping times and weird return policies. This gets at a sort of core problem with this: where is the line between anticompetitive behavior and just "making good products". I was very happy when google did it's hotels thing, the hotel aggregators are by-and-large unpleasant. And as much as there was wailing and gnashing of teeth here about amp, when I was doing a mobile search I would preferentially click amp sites -- they tended to work much better.
Of course all of this depends on what specifically the FTC is arguing, and we won't see that until they actually file.
What they could argue is about the myriad of ways that Amazon uses its market power to put others out of business or force them to sell (diapers.com comes to mind on this[0]).
[0]: https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-be...
Their ownership of AWS, Twitch, MGM, Gaming studios, windfarms, lenders are problems. If they want to be an retail giant, that's fine, but they shouldn't be producing and selling games & movies as well. They need to pick a lane and spin off unrelated entities that only exist because of Amazon's dominance in retail.
Their expansion into all of these market segments make sense in isolation. Amazon builds a better service internally, then begins to offer it for sale to others. But at some point, they've crossed over into abusing their monopoly in one area to expand into another.
Similarly, I have seen a lot of complaints that amazon charges for ad space in the search, and you therefore need to pay to get out of page two. This, again, is widely practiced in retail. The cereal aisle doesn't look like it does because the store manager is making it up, general mills and post rent the space and decide how to arrange their sections. New retail products need to explicitly or implicitly pay for placement: either with cash or with free / discounted product.
Although this one I believe is more of an attempted power play by the FTC, the others not so much.
If so, this is some weak-sauce when it comes to anti-competitive behavior.
Which... as a consumer is exactly what I want.
We should regulate Amazon, and we cannot regulate Temu, we ban it.
Then we're back to the trade war. The tit-for-tat from that became ridiculous.
The question has and will always been, so what are you gonna do about it?
I mean... TSMC is based in Taiwan, and if China were ever to invade they'd have a vested interest in kneecapping American businesses that currently rely on that chip supply (AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm all come to mind) -- for any of a list of reasons ranging from turnabout over the whole Huawei thing to just the obvious incentive to turn that manufacturing capacity toward producing a domestic supply.
In that context, building up domestic suppliers of our own is just a reasonable precaution.
> I think taking down Amazon and maybe busting them up ala AT&T would be a feather in Biden's cap with the liberals and the right thing to do. Then they need to go after Google and Facebook.
But also yes, I'm with you on this wholeheartedly.
I'd further add, given we have a history of breaking up telecom companies specifically for amassing too much market power that you as a consumer to avoid them, that we should probably turn the same to most ISPs. Also that it's baffling that no one's gone after Apple over iMessage, what with the way it actively makes text chains worse the moment anyone involved isn't a customer of theirs.
They keep trying to sell me dildo headware.
I think this is probably wise even if they don't win much:
1) it'll set the boundaries of how courts interpret the current laws, which will inform if there are unpopular holes that could become part of political platforms going forward
2) it'll add that much uncertainty and "cost of doing business" legal expense to companies playing fast and loose in other novel ways because they've known they're unlikely to get challenged
The only real question right now is if the judge whose son quite literally works for Microsoft (!!) will decide that laws don't matter, which has been the main issue with antitrust enforcement in the recent past.
We have an Amazon prime depot about 10 minute walk from our house. The drivers can schedule their deliveries to us either to the beginning or end of their routes, and that shows: we get prime shipping for almost everything. In fact, trying to batch individual items into fewer deliveries is not necessarily even an option anymore. It's rare that I need the order in for next day, and I'd be happy to have the whole batch delivered in 2-3 days. But no, I get a small batch on next day, one item on day 2 and two more on day 3. There is no - or very rarely - option to select "all of these in one go, on day 3, please".
Then again, I live in UK, in the weird place that's both in London and in Kent at the same time. That said, when we do need next-day delivery, it tends to be available for about 50% of the time.
I think we've had two deliveries after 20:00 in the past year.
Some that is because if anything does well in their marketplace, they make an AmazonBasics version and then undercut them.
I don’t think issues should be picking sides so much as seeking the truth.
Amazon had 38% of online retail market share [0] and only 9% of total retail market share [1]. So I think it’s going to be hard to show antitrust violations without some price collusion.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274255/market-share-of-t... [1] https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2022/amazon-and-walmart-m...
Rather, they addresses situations where companies unreasonably exert power to lessen competition.
The idea is to prevent monopolies from forming in the first place.
The unreasonable part is where the monopoly power comes in.
Companies lessening competition happens all the time, it’s the monopoly aspect that triggers antitrust.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power
I'd say Amazon has "significant and durable market power"
Especially because the first part of determining marketshare and market power is determining the market. New markets happen all the time, with old markets dying out. Twenty years ago, smartphones wouldn't have been a market. Fifteen years ago: streaming services.
Like going back to your "Intel with x86", what is the market? x86_64 CPUs? Sure they have monopoly power. All CPUs? Now they don't have as much because they're competing with ARM too. Mobile phone CPUs? I don't think there's been a new Intel phone since the Asus Zenfone 2 (2015).
article - https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/11/...
They are more rigorously enforcing laws against unfair practices, monopoly or not.
"Unfair methods of competition, the policy statement explains, are tactics that seek to gain an advantage while avoiding competing on the merits, and that tend to reduce competition in the market."
> See that filter that orders priority by realized value? Remove it and order by campaign contributions
"We have to been seen doing something, the election cycle is fast approaching. What if we go after Comcast?"
"They gave a important senators son a no show job so they are off limits for the time being"
"Amazon?"
"Let me check, actually they haven't done much for us lately, let's shake them down, if they give my cousin a few million for consulting we give them a small fine, if not we give them the law"
Talk to the FCC, probably.
At least with Amazon I know I'm actually getting it in 2 days or they'll give me a refund (and often times still give me the product too).
I do not want Amazon Prime because in my area (in southeastern Australia), it fails to meet its delivery promises about 95+% of the time, and when that happens, Amazon cancels the order on you half the time and sends it off to some distant pick-up point the other half. Regular Amazon just sends things by post, which is so much more reliable and convenient.
I strongly prefer using smaller online retailers. I have not found it very difficult to find ones that offer better and more honest service (not to mention lower prices) than Amazon. As far as I'm concerned, Amazon is for Kindle books, and occasionally the odd item I can't find anywhere else.
You can't argue that the FTC is unjustified by saying that the OP is wrong in saying it's monopolistic, when FTC isn't saying they're a monopoly.
Like, what even is this discussion?
Sure, but “online retail” is pretty clearly an overly broad market including separate segments between which there is no substitution effect, and there are a whole lot of segments within that where Amazon has majority (>50%) market share (safety & security, communications, home audio, portable audio, etc.)
Not that this is about retail, per se, anyway, except maybe in leveraging market position in retail as an aspect of the anticompetitive behavior regarding sellers planning on using their fulfillment services.
I am sure that for CPG, Amazon’s share is significantly higher.
Over time the experience degraded because they encouraged cheaply copying popular products, and then they even did it themselves and competed with their sellers. And of course their anticompetitive practices have made things much worse for those sellers.
If you use an extension like Honey, it will warn you that a product is available for lower price without Prime.
Edit: this seems particularly monopolistic because it is using its own global logistics to undermine the supply chain to other retailers.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2020/08/26/indian-...
How would one prove that the consumer benefits? The in-house brand will immediately be featured more on search results than the vendor brand.
And another one: Amazon Basics. Free market research with the data from your paying sellers, to then enter a market with a product you know will sell, in a position of dominance. Much like they do with open source in AWS.
They should get hit with billions, but one can only hope.
But these are the things that are pro-competitive. So now they make batteries. They're not putting Energizer out of business, they can still sell through Walmart or local convenience stores etc., and some customers still buy Energizer batteries on Amazon, but now customers have a new option for batteries from a well-known brand with lower prices. Obviously the competitors don't like this -- they're losing business to new competition -- but new competition is good.
Where you run into problems is where companies leverage a dominant market position in one area into abusive practices in another. So for example, if Amazon had a monopoly on retail, they could demand huge margins for reselling a competitor's batteries, or just stop carrying competing batteries and charge high prices for their own because customers have no other option.
But they have no such market power. If they tried to charge significantly more than competing retailers for basic commodities, customers would just buy them from whoever has the best price.
Compare this to, for example, mobile app stores where customers in practice have one store provided by the phone platform and if that store charges high margins or doesn't carry something they want, they have to buy a different device for hundreds of dollars, over a $1 app. Also, there are only two platforms of note so if you dislike any practice shared by both of them you're out of luck, whereas in an ordinary retail market there are a zillion competing retailers.
Moreover, what should businesses use to determine whether to enter a market or how to price their offerings? A dart board doesn't make for an efficient market. It sounds like you're objecting to someone other than the incumbents having access to the threshold amount of data needed to know whether it's worth entering their market.
If the existing competitors were already charging thin margins in a highly competitive market then Amazon could look at the data all they want but their conclusion would be that it makes no sense to enter that market. When that isn't the case, the "victims" of this practice are some other abusive conglomerates with sour grapes.
I was trying to find an airfryer cookbook for one specific model, and they all seem to be auto-generated (chatgpt?) with nothing that is model-specifc.
And all the reviews appear to be auto-genereated as well. sigh.