It's not enough for Amazon to voluntarily adopt these measures, incurring costs only on themselves, but rather for the entire category/industry to be forced to implement these measures, incurring costs on everyone in the market. Even if the measures today are Amazon specific, the likely inexorable path is for this to become standard across the industry, which will eventually benefit those for whom the fixed cost portion can be spread across the largest amount of sales.

So we should just ignore the long list of cases where it has happened, because This Time It Will Be Different?

No, use it when appropriate. Here, it isn’t, because:

- this settlement applies to Amazon only, not any competitor. That doesn’t fit the usual mechanism of using regulation to shackle competition

- regulatory capture also refers to a social mechanism, where regulators become friends with the industry because they spend so much time together etc. That doesn’t fit too well here, because a state attorney’s office is far more diversified than, say, the FAA.

- the points in my initial comment, which you just ignored

I apologize, I was talking specifically about this:

>This supposed “insight” is on its way to become just another tired meme.

On the other hand, people were explicitly talking about regulation, which I took to mean as a wider-reaching thing than just this agreement Amazon made. In this specific case, Amazon is basically acting like the government for the sellers.