> The consumers’ 2021 lawsuit said Amazon violated antitrust law by restricting third-party sellers from offering their products for lower prices elsewhere on rival platforms while they are also for sale on Amazon.
I've noticed that third-party sellers generally get around this by having the same list price on their own site, but basically offering everyone a coupon for 15-30% off. Not just for signing up for e-mails, but spinning a wheel that pops up a discount, items that are on sale 95% of the time, etc.
So while this may very well be anticompetitive of Amazon, at the same time it's generally something savvy sellers and savvy consumers have been able to get around easily for a long time.
Also, amazon straight up steals successful products from 3rd party sellers, rebrands them as Amazon basics, and then undercuts until the 3rd party seller goes out of business
The argument is that it is too large for the court to handle, not too large for Amazon to handle.
Class actions work by grouping many plaintiffs who have been harmed in the same way and whose damages if they win can be addressed in the same way (e.g., everyone gets a fixed amount of money, or a fixed percentage of what they spent, or something like that).
Then the cases of a small number of representatives of the class can be addressed at the actual trial, and the outcome applied to the whole class.
The larger the proposed class the more likely the variation in the harms to the members and in how to redress those harms, which can mean you need a larger number of representatives of the class at the actual trial.
Get large enough and it becomes difficult for the court to manage. In that case the class needs to be shrunk down to a set of plaintiffs with more uniform harms that can be addressed more uniformly. The people removed from the class might form another class or classes for separate suits, or sue as individuals, or some mixture of those options.
Manageable isn't just from Amazon's side, it is also an argument from the side of the plaintiffs. e.g. "This class is too diverse. It will be like herding 300 million cats, which decreases the likelihood of arriving at a suitable settlement. Better to split this into multiple classes with more specific grievances".
Everyone benefits from the class being manageable (except maybe the plaintiffs' attorneys, who just want the biggest class they can possibly find).
Yep, and if legal system won't work in such cases then it clearly need to be redone, somehow. It would be realy easy in monarchy (if monarch wants) so why obvious _effect_ can't be possible with democracy too ?
Same with "right deny to repair" - obviously anti-legal.
Interesting to see this moving forward in the new administration. I guess spiking the WaPo Harris endorsement wasn't quite enough to get Bezos out of the crosshairs.
> The consumers’ 2021 lawsuit said Amazon violated antitrust law by restricting third-party sellers from offering their products for lower prices elsewhere on rival platforms while they are also for sale on Amazon.
Holy shit, do Valve next! They do the exact same thing.
They do not. You are free to sell your game anywhere online for less. You simply cannot use the ability to generate steam keys to sell steam games externally and then proceed to undercut steam.
You are leveraging their infrastructure for that transaction and sale, they are free to set the rules there. They do not otherwise charge you for the infrastructure costs related to purchasing the game, supplying continued redownload, supplying update infrastructure and so on.
You can otherwise take your game and sell it on the Epic store or GOG or run your own download infrastructure and foot the thousands in bandwidth bills. And charge whatever you want
Very excited for my impending choice between a 30-day extension to my Prime membership or a $5 off of $50 coupon for anything in the Prime Fresh store.
...after 5 years of lawfare and gozillions spent, of course. :/
The next class action needs to address the anticompetitive procedure of artificially protecting shit products by deleting critical customer reviews.
In my Prime account, 90 percent of my reviews are positive, but because I've left several scathing, unapologetic negative reviews for products that shouldn't exist, all my reviews are now placed in eternal limbo. None of my reviews ever actually post.
For the reviews that posted, three months later when the product stops working, Amazon prohibits me from updating the original review. The FTC is well aware of this too.
Keep this in mind when evaluating a product using reviews as a metric. And further note the egregious usurpation of the review content search function being replaced by Rufus, the world's foremost most worthless heap of artificially generated product deception.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 62.2 ms ] threadI've noticed that third-party sellers generally get around this by having the same list price on their own site, but basically offering everyone a coupon for 15-30% off. Not just for signing up for e-mails, but spinning a wheel that pops up a discount, items that are on sale 95% of the time, etc.
So while this may very well be anticompetitive of Amazon, at the same time it's generally something savvy sellers and savvy consumers have been able to get around easily for a long time.
Also, amazon straight up steals successful products from 3rd party sellers, rebrands them as Amazon basics, and then undercuts until the 3rd party seller goes out of business
Republic of Tea blackberry sage tea, 50 count - $11 on their site, $13 on Amazon with Republic of Tea as the seller.
https://www.republicoftea.com/blackberry-sage-black/p/v00590...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0024SDYLI
And that's not really a super obscure product, since it's ranked #69 best selling for the "black tea" category.
The only people that benefit here are the lawyers on both sides.
LOL, they literally have a giant data center at their disposal and some of the best automation geniuses in the world.
Class actions work by grouping many plaintiffs who have been harmed in the same way and whose damages if they win can be addressed in the same way (e.g., everyone gets a fixed amount of money, or a fixed percentage of what they spent, or something like that).
Then the cases of a small number of representatives of the class can be addressed at the actual trial, and the outcome applied to the whole class.
The larger the proposed class the more likely the variation in the harms to the members and in how to redress those harms, which can mean you need a larger number of representatives of the class at the actual trial.
Get large enough and it becomes difficult for the court to manage. In that case the class needs to be shrunk down to a set of plaintiffs with more uniform harms that can be addressed more uniformly. The people removed from the class might form another class or classes for separate suits, or sue as individuals, or some mixture of those options.
Sorry, we've wronged too many people to be held accountable! What a wild argument.
Everyone benefits from the class being manageable (except maybe the plaintiffs' attorneys, who just want the biggest class they can possibly find).
Same with "right deny to repair" - obviously anti-legal.
Stupidity can't win forever.
Holy shit, do Valve next! They do the exact same thing.
You are leveraging their infrastructure for that transaction and sale, they are free to set the rules there. They do not otherwise charge you for the infrastructure costs related to purchasing the game, supplying continued redownload, supplying update infrastructure and so on.
You can otherwise take your game and sell it on the Epic store or GOG or run your own download infrastructure and foot the thousands in bandwidth bills. And charge whatever you want
...after 5 years of lawfare and gozillions spent, of course. :/
In my Prime account, 90 percent of my reviews are positive, but because I've left several scathing, unapologetic negative reviews for products that shouldn't exist, all my reviews are now placed in eternal limbo. None of my reviews ever actually post.
For the reviews that posted, three months later when the product stops working, Amazon prohibits me from updating the original review. The FTC is well aware of this too.
Keep this in mind when evaluating a product using reviews as a metric. And further note the egregious usurpation of the review content search function being replaced by Rufus, the world's foremost most worthless heap of artificially generated product deception.
Amazon is indefensibly sinister.