Re:Amazon is reportedly negotiating to acquire MGM for about...
by bhupy on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @12:40PM
(#27197278)
Thanks for the correction, you're absolutely right about the ebook market share.
Notwithstanding that, I think the general point is that this is a vertical acquisition completely unrelated to that market, in which Amazon has nowhere close to that kind of market share.
Keep in mind that nobody here is arguing that we ought to have a free-for-all in acquisitions and do away with the FTC entirely. It's just that the FTC doesn't operate off of knee-jerk reactions to absolute dollar amount market valuations. Instead, the level of analysis is one that's more in line with what the GP commenter has been arguing.
> Amazon has well over half of US book sales, and probably three quarters of ebook sales. So if we’re arguing about how Amazon runs its books business, it unquestionably has market dominance. You have to pull out a segment, not the whole company.
To speak more generally, my understanding is that arguments that Amazon is a monopolist are stronger when we focus on Amazon Marketplace than on (say) AWS, partly because there are many "segments" in which almost all products are sold through Amazon. But I wish that I had more data about this particular claim.