> That reduces competition and allows Amazon to charge more.

that never happens, unless there's a regulation in place that prevents new sellers to get into the market as quickly as they can. When a price for the product begins to rise, it attracts new sellers, as now there's a wider price range to position your competing product.

You're focused to much on Amazon. Every company does this just go to your local Walmart, everything is white-label. A law like this would have to be applied to them as well.

> A law like this would have to be applied to them as well.

You say it as if that was a bad thing. More competition is good for the consumer, bad for the oligopolists.

On the contrary, house brand products are great for consumers. Rather than having to figure out if they can trust a brand for a product category that they really don't care about, they can just buy the house brand knowing that a certain minimum level of quality exists. This is why Amazon Basics products are so popular on Amazon: consumers know that, at the very least, Amazon can be sued, a form of recourse that is not available with most of the smaller brands and sellers on their platform.

This is me. I bought an AmazonBasics product initially, a phone cable, thinking it would be crap. It wasn't. So I bought another one, a set of HDMI cables. They weren't crap either! Then I bought AmazonBasics wash cloths as a joke. They were quite nice! Now I find myself shopping around the AmazonBasics section first. I still find it amusing in a "Spaceballs, the flamethrower!" kind of way.

Where IS the AmazonBasics section? Is there a way to restrict searches to only Amazon white label products?

I see it as a tab at the top

But Amazon launching new products is strictly more competition, so...

Similarly how Microsoft launching Internet Explorer to beat Netscape and eat another Market was technically more competition (for a while, until they've established another monopoly and all competition ceases).

This is a frequent trick in econ 101-style defenses of anarchic markets - play with the time horizon.

If you're hungry, a soda is "great for the consumer". For 15 minutes, it alleviates that feeling. Does it follow that everyone should consume only soda?

If they attempt to charge more in the future when others exit, that will invite a flood of competition to re-enter.

People seem to think "capitalism" produces the best results simply because of privatization, but it is the competition that is created. It doesn't matter if the one producer is Soviet Russia or Amazon, it hurts everyone in the long run when their is one supplier.