Only certain big box retailers do that, like Best Buy, whose business model have them leasing floor space in their physical locations, which has tangible scarcity.

Amazon is not leasing retail floor space, so to GP's point, any comparisons between Amazon's open platform and traditional physical retail spaces are moot.

I think retail stores controlling what you see based on how much money they get which is quite similar to Amazon controlling what you see in a search result based on profitability, but I guess we can agree to disagree. However, it's not just stores like Best Buy. Your local grocery store almost certainly makes a large percentage of their profit from companies paying for shelf space. End caps don't come out of thin air.

Again, comparisons with physical retail are moot because, in your grocery store, nobody can walk in off the street and start selling off the shelves. The grocery store is not an open e-commerce platform but a curated service with physical scarcity.

People don't have an issue with Amazon default sorting to best selling either. The problem is that Amazon is slowly pushing out the competition on their platform to focus their own products and labels. If there's any analogy, it would be similar Google removing search result links to Bing or Yandex.

> Again, comparisons with physical retail are moot because, in your grocery store, nobody can walk in off the street and start selling off the shelves. The grocery store is not an open e-commerce platform but a curated service with physical scarcity.

So, if Amazon marketplace was an invite-only, curated marketplace and not an "open" marketplace, this wouldn't be a problem?