this is not the problem that people are grappling with, though! the problem is that amazon can see that your product is doing well by looking at "their own" platform data and then competing with you based on your own sales data. I would hope that anyone entering in to a market that Amazon, or any big player, is in would already be aware of their competition.
Amazon can choose at any time to peek at the data and simply flood a market that they know they can dominate on their own marketplace -- does that not seem unfair to people? It seems to me that as long as Amazon is able and willing to profit off of sellers' and services' data on their platforms, they will incentive their employees to take advantage of that in the name of ~Consumer Value~, all else be damned.
Who isn't aware of it though? Every major retailer has their own store brand, and it's been like that since before any of us were born.
At least Amazon clearly marks their brand, unlike some companies create brands like "Open Nature" which is clearly meant to disguise their origin.
Even if the controls were somewhat weak in practice, his inability to commit to that even on paper is damning.
I've no idea if anything at all will come of it, or whether anything that does will be good or bad, but this hearing wasn't just about getting verbal commitments of being good from the CEOs (despite there being several questions did ask for verbal commitments in various areas).
Just because your safeguards will not be perfect doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have any. It is akin to saying as there are many zero days out there so I won’t secure my infrastructure at all .
I recognize there may be very different values in play but I find calling that wrong bizzare and arbitrary.
It is to prevent a conflict of interest , the banking division can refuse to finance a competitor , give very cheap financing ignore the risk of the non finance business etc,
to put it in monopoly terms , you wouldn’t the player being banker to give cheap loans to himself while refusing to give you money right ?
There should be rules in place to stop them from effectively defrauding sellers (e.g. terminating accounts / promotions / offers without contract-backed cause, canceling wholesale orders outside of contract).
Even outside of the ethics of it, anyone else that wants to can offer a competing product on Amazon even if Amazon doesn't (and this happens like a dozen times a day).