So now monopoly power is not a concern anymore? How did we get to this point?
Does anyone believe that the fact that a founder can only have, say 10 billion and not 100 prevent anyone from starting a startup?
I don‘t think so.
What producer of a consumer good sold through Amazon could afford to lose 40% of their retail presence/revenue overnight? Well in the current environment, Amazon has that power. Its extremely unbalanced and lets them really crush any rising opposition unless you trust they won't unfairly wield that power.
Those are all different issues though with different potential regulatory tools to apply against them vs a monopolist simply outright raising prices for buyers. I'm definitely concerned that way, way too many people have started to just reach for the big BREAK 'EM UP hammer for any problem they see, despite the potential for nasty battles delaying effectiveness and enormous and unpredictable side effects. I'd really like to see much more focused efforts tried first, particularly since a big central target can actually be easier to regulate and check for certain things. There is plenty of low hanging fruit at Amazon like their commingling practices, but such things tend to be more technocratic.
I'm concerned that focused efforts like that are seen as "boring" and in turn not getting the attention they should. This is similar to how I feel about other areas like secure hardware stacks. Rather then "break up Apple/Google!!!" I'd much, much rather see things like "devices owners must have the option to load their own crypto roots with equal power as any manufacturer roots" or "devices must be warranted for 1 month/$20 retail price up to 60 months" or the like done. They're not as catchy politics but they'd be really directly useful without risking a lot of the value scale can bring.
I don't know but, there are two potential cases that pop up that could be such as them leveraging internal data on their third party sellers to out compete them and putting their products first in line which as we know from search carries a lot of weight for what people click.
And then there's the part where this has to be bad for consumers. Sucks for competitors but anti-trust has also historically been used when a companies practices are bad for the consumer. My life has only gotten better using Amazon services I don't know about you.
My point being is that there are things that legally could be construed as anti-competitive but I as a consumer am not hurt and third party sellers and other competitors generally speaking and in my opinion, suck. I'm not in the business of breaking up companies simply because they're better.
Are there any examples of them actually doing this?
The comment is referring to the fact that companies trying to sell goods online are given a choice to either forego 40% of potential revenues or work with Amazon. This gives Amazon an enormous amount of leverage over suppliers.
>The comment is referring to the fact that companies trying to sell goods online are given a choice to either forego 40% of potential revenues or work with Amazon. This gives Amazon an enormous amount of leverage over suppliers.
Antitrust law (at least in the US) is conducted on the basis of harm to consumers. If Amazon's negotiating power with suppliers results in better prices/outcomes for consumers, then there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. As a producer, nobody is obligated to buy what you're selling.
http://sites.middlebury.edu/econ0450f10/files/2010/08/bastia... is a nice argument why laws should try to benefit consumers, not producers.
This is far from a consensus view amongst lawmakers and economists.
The concern is how effectively a company like this could reinvest into their other verticals. Grocery stores are low margin. Cloud computing is one of Amazons highest profit sectors. Is it fair to smaller(smaller being relative in this case) grocers such as Meijer, Publix, or Kroger to compete against Whole Foods which is a company that can actively lose profit due to backing from other Amazon verticals such as AWS?
Though the parts of the "supply chain" are really different verticals they can use the revenue from to compete in their other verticals. The consequences are likely different but I haven't seen how it's bad yet at least against other large companies.
Instead, foster competition by handing out grants to competitors on the condition that they can't be sold to the Big Co for 10 years, and provide mentoring to those startups.
Also, 10 billion vs 100 is arbitrary and could easily vary from market to market, and is determined by who?
Here we edge into the moral question of whether it is ok to be a billionaire, and the discussion taps into the current outrage against the 1%.
I think it is ok to be a billionaire, if and only if you give back to the community commensurately - something like a 50% flat income tax (no deductions, applies to all income including investment earnings/interest) if your net worth is over 1 billion.
With what goal? More gigantic conglomerates? Or after ten years, they get rolled up into an existing one? To me, this sounds like it would make the problem worse.
What is your concern with negative reinforcement? Pretty much our entire legislation is based on the concept of fines and punishment.
How is it even remotely your business how much money other people have given somebody? A billionare (assuming they didn't inherit it) has already given way more back to the community than the average person, because they brought into existance something that collectively brought billions of dollars of value to people.
Amazon claims it's against their internal policies. But it's widespread and there's no indication those policies serve as anything more than plausible deniability - i.e. managers can tell employees to increase sales, give them access to the seller's data, and just have them agree on paper that they won't use the data but never enforce it.
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.427726...
>As a result, I estimate that producing responsive information to Plaintiffs’ request for sales data for 5,376 ASINs from October 1, 2011 to the present will take between 5,376 and 8,064 hours of Amazon paralegal time. Assuming a 40 hour work week, based on these estimates it would take one paralegal working full time 2.5 to 3.8 years to collect just the sales data Plaintiffs are seeking from Amazon. I calculated this based on my estimate of 60-90 minutes per ASIN for 5,376 ASINs.
They built part of a logistics chain and acquired the rest.
>skys the limit
Why should those being exploited be limited by amazon? The sky should the limit for every individual not just Bezos.
>Prime books
If you broke up prime you would have nothing. The reason people subscribe is the overlap with multiple markets which is what makes it a monopolistic strategy. It uses loss leaders from one market to destroy competition in other markets with the intent to later raise prices.
> Because they built it.
This is an entirely fictional idea.
Consider who this language serves. Bezos started the company, but how does it make sense to say he “built” all of the businesses mentioned? They were built by many thousands of people, but they barely own what they created.
Bezos has abused his position as founder to capitalize on their work. If he hadn’t started the company, these people would still have found ways to build things, perhaps even under less heinous conditions.
If they had the opportunity to build things in better conditions, why aren't they already doing that?
Look at it this way, if nobody did what Bezos did, nobody quit their job to try starting a business (bearing in mind something like over 90% of businesses fail, so it's a significant risk), then there wouldn't be any jobs. We'd all still be subsistence farmers. And this is essentially the condition that the world was in before we had a government/legal system that allowed people to create and grow businesses free from molestation.
If not for Bezos, Amazon wouldn't exist, and all the beneft people gained from the superior convenience, prices and delivery speed it offered compared to competitors would have been lost.
Heck, Amazon isn't even Amazon any more. Its a two- or three-removed reinvention of what Amazon started out to be.
It would have happened later, so everybody's standard of living would have been a little lower. The more you discourage people from starting businesses, the fewer people try to start businesses, so successful new business are created more slowly, and the economy grows slower. It's also more likely the company will appear first in another country more friendly to business, and then the original country will lose out on the revenue, jobs and soft power it might have gained from that country operating there.
Examples, from light walls where light is used to guide placement to pickup, indicator lights on bins for the same, to voice prompts in language of choice, all guided by computers because they know exactly where the gun/scan device the employee is holding.
Still I find it disappointing people only concentrate on the warehouse worker while completely ignoring other low wage workers they are likely working around but tend to be invisible to you, from mail clerks, building maintenance, and even the security guard at the front desk.
Look, not all jobs are equal nor should you assume offense on some other person's part. Believe me, I got the shock of my life working in IT while working for a "rent a cop" company. That some people earned and lived on what some of them made was both amazing and a little disappointing to me. Yet a few I would talk to thought it was fine as they had a job where they didn't have to put much effort into doing to get paid; plus in that line some were fond of being indoors and having a uniform. Basically what we find unacceptable other's will just blow off our opinion as being snotty or worse.
I was with you up until this point. So now instead of having one institution that I'm beholden to for my livelihood, I have two. Unions are just another form of institution that can succumb to the same kinds of corruption and bad practices as the company I work for.
Why not start with a higher minimum wage, or incentivizing companies to pay a living wage across all roles, or UBI, or cheaper/universal health care - something so that workers at shitty companies can say "screw this" and leave.
Amazon has so many different components in their conglomerate that there are many ways to draw lines.
The solution then is to fix that problem through mandatory reporting and unions, not to break up the company.
"Why on earth should an online retailer, a cloud computing company, a smart speaker company, an organic supermarket company, and a video production company all be conglomerated into one corporate entity controlled by one person?"
Because they built it. Do we tell people building startups that the sky is the limit, unless you become too big or do something too many people consider wrong, and in that case we'll take it away from you?
Also because an economy of scale helps consumers. Amazon Prime gives access to music, books, delivery of home goods, delivery of groceries, and much more. Break it up and you will have Prime Music, Prime Books, Prime Home, Prime Market subscriptions, each for nearly the same price - one sub for each piece you break the company into.
I agree something must be done - the stories of the workers read like Bram Stoker award-winning horror novels, but swinging the needle the other way and completely breaking the company apart is over-reaction.
My suggestion: mandate unions in every field, every worker must be part of at least one union, and union dues must be paid as a tax by the employers.