> At what point does Amazon get broken up?

They'd have to violate the law. As it stands, they're not engaging in anti-competitive activity. Simply being better at something than your competition isn't anti-competitive.

> Seems like we're heading to a dystopian future where megacorps own you in every sense.

Literally every business that Amazon has entered has improved my life. Books are cheaper with an enormously larger selection available. Prime Video offers alternative to Netflix. AWS has revolutionized the software industry.

Don't get me wrong -- Amazon is in it for Amazon, and I think Jeff Bezo's can be an asshole. But the reason they get my money year after year is that they do such a great job.

You should look up the history of Boeing and the Air Mail act of 1934. Boeing airplanes, United airlines and United technologies all used to be the same company. But all the arguments people use about Amazon today were put to Boeing then. Too much synergy allowing for less competition, too large of a company, etc. It was good for the consumer on the short term, but not the long term.

They were broken up by an act of Congress. All three companies have done just fine. And there's lots of competition in all three industries.

And as a guy working for Amazon, I thing if Amazon got split up, all the child companies would do just fine. The secret to success is the culture. I doubt it will ever happen though.

I would be very surprised if AWS does not get spun off at some point.

Then all the other companies would mostly halt in growth. Most of the other subsidiaries' growth are, well, subsidized by AWS

Just because your life is better isn't a strong argument for or against anti-trust actions.

The current framework in antitrust, the consumer welfare framework, really fails to capture forms of market power and forms of dominance that should be relevant to antitrust and do raise competition concerns. We should really question the existing anti trust laws and whether they are suitable for the 21st century.

Companies, without monopolies, are starting to exert serious soft power, often bending governments, crushing competition and engaging in anti-competitive behavior without a pure monopoly.

> As it stands, they're not engaging in anti-competitive activity.

Try telling that to diapers.com

> Simply being better at something than your competition isn't anti-competitive.

Couldn't agree more on this part.

it's improve your life because you're probably a highly paid software developer or engineer (guessing because here you are on hacker news). I would like to hear more from the people who work for amazon (not the devs reaping all of the rewards of stock shares) and the retailers selling their goods on amazon to see if the company has "improved" their lives.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17243026/amazon-warehouse...

Engineers are not the majority of Amazon's customers. Nor are they the ones that benefit most from buying there.

For example, consider single mothers working two jobs, ordering from Amazon.com to save time & money. And depending on where they live, they might even get the order within a couple hours. That's a new kind of efficiency that many benefit from.

Consider why that person has to work two jobs, and the contribution Amazon made towards that.

Low prices aren't free. Some of it came from efficiency, the rest comes from simply paying labor less.

That's a different discussion and it's hard to untangle and weigh all of the effects. But it's worth noting that the % of people working multiple jobs has actually decreased with the rise of Amazon.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/4-point-9-percent-of-worke...

That's not to say it's casual. Maybe it would've decreased more sans Amazon. Who knows.

Anyway, the point was simply that it's not only/mostly engineers who derive value from their existence. It includes every Amazon customer who saves time & money - especially those who have too little of both.

It also includes every person who lives in a city whose tax base has been eroded by Amazon, so those "hard working single moms" send their kids to shitty schools that will perpetuate the cycle of poverty.

For tens of millions of working poor who live in apartment complexes, Amazon provides absolutely zero benefit since they cannot order anything bigger than a kumquat without risk of it being stolen off of their porch. The office? The office doesnt exist or is closed during the hours they are working - and UPS wont deliver there anyways a lot of the time.

In theory that’s what Amazon Locker is for, though it’s less convenient.

Those people aren't the customers, though.

"Amazon has made MY life better" (in the short term) is a remarkably unsophisticated argument.

Well, the obvious generalization is that Amazon makes many lives better.

Amazon is just one facet of a larger phenomenon of social and economic centralization and the ever-intensifying tournament by which the resources are distributed as a natural and necessary consequence.

Conglomerates aren't new and aren't by themselves something to consider antitrust action over. Samsung does everything from highway construction to chip fabrication to making appliances.

What's South Korea's anti-trust laws like? Chaebols aren't exactly well regarded, are they?

- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/business/south-korea-chae...

Amazon probably won't get broken up as long as people continue to get the lowest prices from them.

As far as owning you in every sense, that won't happen until these companies start buying up so much property that they rival military bases in family services offered. At that point, once it becomes possible to live cradle to grave on a company's property, that's when you will be owned.

>as long as people continue to get the lowest prices from them.

I don't really think that's the breakpoint as to if something gets broken up or not.

Currently, it's actually the definition of when something gets broken up or not. Anitrust today focuses on consumer wealthfare and not corporate power. However, there are some politicians like Elizabeth Warren who are argueing to change that criteria. This is often referred to as "Hipster Antitrust"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_Antitrust

For a great series on the history of anti-trust and the current debates on its application to tech companies check out this short Planet Money Series:

Antitrust 1: Standard Oil https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/15/695131832/anti...

Antitrust 2: The Paradox https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/20/696342011/anti...

Antitrust 3: Big Tech https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/anti...

Hipster Antitrust is basically how antitrust used to function before Bork. Just about the same time when income inequality really started to accelerate

Yeah I thought that was super interesting. The podcast covers that too.

If Amazon was just in-housing all of these business lines for the use of their core business (vertical integration), I don't think there would be a case for antitrust. Getting into freight makes sense for the supply chain of a global retailer. However, they insist on platform-itizing everything to the point that the argument could be made that the platform IS the business, and things get murkier. (IANAL or subject matter expert).

I sometimes wonder if there is some power (whatever we want that to mean) threshold at which an invalid antitrust case is brought simply because of the amount of power under discussion. Extreme and improbable hypothetical:

Amazon hits ~$2.5T in annual revenue, while the GDP of France stagnates at ~$2.5T.

Assuming that there is zero evidence for an antitrust case to be built (again, this is an extreme and improbable and rather outlandish scenario), would the U.S. have an interest in simply brute forcing the break-up of Amazon simply on the grounds that the company itself has too much geopolitical clout/power/influence/etc.?

I'm seriously curious.

> Extreme and improbable hypothetical:

> Amazon hits ~$2.5T in annual revenue, while the GDP of France stagnates at ~$2.5T.

> Assuming that there is zero evidence for an antitrust case to be built (again, this is an extreme and improbable and rather outlandish scenario), would the U.S. have an interest in simply brute forcing the break-up of Amazon simply on the grounds that the company itself has too much geopolitical clout/power/influence/etc.?

In this hypothetical, how much money a year do you estimate they'd spend on politics? It's not like the country is a body with a single mind.

I'd wager their lobbying efforts would increase roughly in parallel with their revenue (or something like that).

What law do you think they’ve broken to justify breaking them up? You can’t just dismantle someone’s business because you think they should structure it differently.

I think the argument is around anti-competitive behavior based on them controlling both the platform (Amazon Marketplace) and their own store (Amazon Basics/Whole Foods). This Verge article [1] cites the Diapers.com incident, where they basically cut prices until Diapers.com couldn't compete and had no choice but to be acquired.

There are also the ongoing investigations in Germany around anti-competitive behaviors. [2]

I'm not making a judgement on validity, just pointing to what people are likely referencing.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/5/17805162/monopoly-antitrus...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-germany/amazon...

Reconsider the current system and change the laws, obviously. The Consumer Welfare Standard fails to capture forms of market power and forms of dominance that should be relevant to antitrust and do raise competition concerns.

What happens when Amazon hypothetically reaches state level income but doesn't break any laws? How much is enough soft power? How much is enough power for one corporation, monopoly or not?

It's interesting that I got so much push back for this discussion, seems fairly obvious this can end badly for the average person.

If you’re making custom laws to deliberately target specific businesses you don’t like then that’s a red flag your new law is abusive.

Businesses exist at and only at the sufferance of the society that grants that charter and need only be permitted to exist so long as there is positive social benefit to their existence. One cannot "abuse" a business by requiring them to properly hold up their end of the bargain.

We have mostly forgotten--to our detriment as societies around the world--that businesses exist to serve the collective us of citizenry and society. Not the other way around.

This has nothing to do with specific businesses, just the size and scale that businesses are reaching now. This has nothing to do with Amazon, they are just an elegant example of a broken system.

Corporations that have serious soft power but have broken no laws should cause us to ask deep questions about what it means to be "anti trust" in the 21st century. The consumer welfare framework is a weak and ineffective framework for today's modern corporations.

> The Consumer Welfare Standard fails to capture forms of market power and forms of dominance that should be relevant to antitrust and do raise competition concerns.

Why would I care about anything other than consumer welfare?

Screw for profit businesses. I don't care about their welfare. I only care about consumers.

Because consumers are also workers, that's how they have money to be consumers. If there are no worker rights, then there is no consumer income, and if there are no workers, because they have all been "made redundant" by a monpolostic oligarchy, there are no consumers.

This doesn't have much to do with workers rights, though.

If a company is in both the grocery industry, and the shipping industry, I see no reason as for how that hurts workers.

There are lots of grocery stores, and lots of shipping companies. Thus, one company does not control all jobs in these industries. It is not even close.

If you want to talk about minimum wage laws, fine go ahead. But that has nothing at all to do with conglomerate companies. It effects all companies, and arguably smaller companies are worse on this front, because they are less efficient, and therefore have less total money to spread around.

It doesn't seem like they have a monopoly in any one area.

All of these services enrich the lives of millions.