Bookstores are no longer viable, because Amazon has obviated the need for a brick and mortars store, and it passes the benefit on to both consumer and author alike, in reduced prices and thus increased sales.

Since Amazon is not in the authorship business itself, since it gets an equal profit on all books, its book business is a lovely example of markets working to further society.

Amazon's problem is in the use of data metrics on its giant store to create products that compete with its partners. The Amazon Essentials line is anticompetitive IMO, because as the operator of such a large platform, Amazon has a responsibility to the US economy.

Curious on your thoughts about Kroger/Great Value/Archer Farms (Target) brand items? At least Amazon marks them clearly as house-brand, Archer Farms is practically camouflaged at Target among the brand names, and it's placed pretty prominently too.

Personally I think it's hard to draw a distinction between the two cases - either they're both fine or they're both not. My line would be closer to: if Amazon noticed a certain thing was selling really well, created their own version of that thing, and then de-listed the original thing from their store, that seems like the point at which it becomes anti-competitive to me.

Store brands are an age-old practice so it's interesting to revisit them in the context of mega-corps like Amazon. Although WalMart+Great Value is probably a similar scale.

While they don't delist items, their algo favors products they sell directly to the extent that Amazon will get the buy box over a third party seller even when that seller is reputable and cheaper. Add that the 3rd party seller has to pay a sales fee to Amazon, often making it impossible to compete with them without approaching zero margin.

It's not delisting but it's the next best thing. If Amazon starts selling something you sell, your sales are gone, you were just free market research for them.

Which is still the same in the Target example where their own brand product get much favourable placement. This practice has been going on for so long possibly before all of us on HN were born.

It is a tactic often used in dispute, that is why Brands needs to work on Branding to combat this stronghold from Distribution. And one reason why small brands likes the Internet so much rather than working with conventional distribution channel.

A direct comparison would be target putting your product behind their product on the shelf where the shopper can't see it without digging for it.

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/7/17208804/amazon-private-label-b...

cruelly -> actually

Walmart and Costco do it too, should that it be banned when customers get the product at a cheaper cost?

Which is why lower consumer prices aren't a valid defence against anti=trust. Nor is the argument that markets "naturally" lead to monopolies or (at best) oligopolies and cartels - even though empirically they do. So much so that setting out to create a monopoly is a bullet point on many unicorn-wannabe business plans.

The problem is abuse of power without oversight.

YouTube can screw over content creators with its insane system of copyright strikes. PayPal and Amazon can keep legitimately earned money on the pretext of non-existent ToC violations. Apple can decide to bar you from the App Store on a whim and clean-room your best green shoots ideas into its own products. Google can decide that you earned too much in ad revenue and shut you down just because it can.

People have lost businesses and livelihoods because of these practices. The monopoly position held by these companies makes them unassailable.

That's what antitrust protection is really about.

https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-pr...

Prices didn't go up until the government forced Standard Oil to break up. It had nothing to do with the competition being "crushed"; it had to do with the government taking the attitude you mention, that lower consumer prices didn't matter. Which seems daft since lower consumer prices mean consumers, i.e., the people, are better off.

==since lower consumer prices mean consumers, i.e., the people, are better off.==

Over what time frame are they better off?

Are workers (also people) better off?

No, but any supposed other benefits that outweigh prices getting higher are even harder to measure, so basing government intervention on them is even harder to justify.

> Over what time frame are they better off?

Um, whatever time frame the prices are lower?

> Are workers (also people) better off?

If they have to spend less on what they need, it would seem so.

“Spend less on what they need” is same Walmart argument we’ve heard for decades. Meanwhile, the middle class shrinks and many of the things people need to improve their lives (shelter, healthcare, education) get more and more expensive and wages stagnate.

I don't think that necessarily follows; price is big, but not everything. I don't care how cheap products are on Amazon, I still refuse to buy computer storage or anything that goes in the human body since they are either unwilling or unable to deal with counterfeiting problem.

Standard Oil didn't have a "counterfeiting problem", so I don't see how this is relevant to them. Or, for that matter, to any other large monopoly that has been broken up by antitrust action.

Also, you as a consumer might judge that, for example, you don't trust Amazon to deliver the product you want in a certain area, regardless of how low the price is. That's fine. But that in itself is no argument for breaking up Amazon in an antitrust action. It's just an argument for not trusting Amazon for certain types of products.

It seems like there aren’t any middle-quality products anymore: you can buy a cheap plastic item that never works quite right and will break next month, or you can buy a chrome-plated showpiece item that costs too much. Where’s the non-disposable, ugly, bulletproof utility version these days?

I think there still are, but I agree it's very hard to find any on Amazon, at least in a lot of product categories. You have to spend time trawling actual brick and mortar stores.

The problem is abuse of power without oversight

This is exactly how I feel about me dealing as a business with the big corps. But I did not actually had this experience myself. Reason is simple: I just do not engage. As a business I do not uses any cloudy stuff at all. Everything I do I host either myself or on rented servers that I could change on a moment's notice. No Youtube, no Apple app store, no hosting my software using Azure/Amazon/etc, no Github (I host my own), no Gmail etc.etc.

Is it? Or is that what good regulation is for? What if YouTube and their competitors all nerfed and deplatformed popular creators because of advertiser pressures? Isn’t this a better argument for regulation?

Remember that the reason that Bork defined antitrust the way he did was because there wasn’t a methodical definition of where it should be applied in the 60’s, and the govt was arbitrarily interventionist.

what's clear, however, is that they use their e-commerce position to also one-up competitors as a retailer. they have access to data about what's hot, what could benefit from a more economic option, etc. which they can use - perhaps anti-competitively (by e.g. intentionally selling at loss to defeat the new competitor).

additionally, their entire cloud computing arm affords them the opportunity to run other parts of their business at a massive loss, perhaps intentionally (again, to defeat competitors) as needed.

as an analogy, imagine if standard oil also had a financial operation that low-balled "normal" banks, intentionally losing money on every loan or instrument, just so those other banks blew up.

Now, French book-sellers, on the other hand, appreciate the law that keeps them in business for aesthetic reasons, whether or not it makes economic sense or they can stay financially competitive when the price of data transmission has crashed past too-small-to-meter-per-word.

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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/opinion/paul-krugman-amaz...

Economists are quick to point out that the new money which is created of of thin air is not given outright, but rather, it is loaned out - Therefore, by virtue of having to pay it back, corporations do not have an unfair advantage.

I disagree with this conclusion because an entity's access to loans is based almost entirely on how much collateral they possess - This necessarily implies that those entities which have more capital are able to take out bigger loans and thus derive more profits from these loans.

For example, if you have $100K in a particular asset (e.g. stocks), you can use that as collateral to borrow an additional $100K and you end up controlling $200K worth of assets in total. So if the yield on those assets is 10% per year, you will end up getting 20% per year relative to your own capital. 20% of $100K is $20K.

So according to this principle, a company which has $100 million in assets can borrow an additional $100 million - This means that an asset class which can generate 10% yield can be bought on leverage to generate 20% yield on the initial capital. 20% of $100 million is $20 million. This means that $10 million of that profit was derived entirely from credit which was printed out of thin air by banks. That $10 million is free money and was given solely on the basis of existing capital.

This is why the rich get richer; it has nothing to do with value creation. Whenever banks print money out of thin air and inject it into the economy, everyone in the country who receives a salary in that currency ends up paying for that equally because of dilution in the value of their salaries. In effect, this means that, salary earners and small capital owners are subsidizing big capital owners. This is what is fundamentally unfair about our financial system and why big corporations have to be limited; they're not successful because they're efficient, they're successful because they own more capital than everyone else and can thus access most of the newly 'printed' fiat money.

Most of us just don't get to borrow 100 million, good credit ain't cheap...

That's debatable. If I want a specific book, sure. But Amazon simply cannot replicate the experience of browsing a bookstore looking for an interesting book to read. I cannot physically hold the book in my hands, flip through it's pages, maybe read a few excerpts, etc. And if I'm buying a used book, I can't inspect the actual condition myself before purchasing.