I'm not sure small and medium businesses are really the "bedrock of American capitalist power." Maybe you could argue they're the bedrock of American values or something like that.

Just to see if we were right or wrong, I found this article. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/77398

Here are stand out ones from the article. For just small business alone. I actually thought middle size business would have had figures like this.

* Small businesses create 75 percent of the net new jobs in our economy. * Small businesses pay more than 44 percent of the nation's private payroll. * More than 50 percent of the U.S. private gross domestic product is generated by small businesses. * Almost 97 percent of exporters are small businesses.

Those numbers are certainly much better than I expected, but "capitalist power" is kind of abstract and I was thinking such a thing was better represented by GM, Lockheed Martin, Apple, etc. -- i.e., companies with resources and influence to rival some sovereign powers.

yea, I hear ya! I can live with that :)

But Amazon doesn't do this to their vendors.

They most certainly do and have.

Take Books and Ebooks for a good example.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/cheap-words

I was referring to these smaller firms as was addressed in the comment.

Regarding the major book selling firms, Amazon are the good guys because a relatively few book firms control the market. Amazon is helping to improve the customer experience by lowering the price of books.

> Amazon are the good guys because a relatively few book firms control the market. Amazon is helping to improve the customer experience by lowering the price of books.

they're replacing an oligopoly that is exploiting their customers with a monopoly though.

amazon hasn't really started exploiting its monopoly status yet (to my knowledge) toward the consumers, but a lot of authors have already started to complain about it.

I looked into this issue awhile ago and may have even written about it in HN. The publishers are trying to take a larger share of the income from Amazon for eBooks over traditional publishing leaving the authors with less than before even though production costs for publishers are far lower for eBooks. Amazon was trying to work to get authors at least the same proportion of the money they get for eBooks as for hardcopy traditional books.