Does a company need to be beneficial to an organized society, or does a company need to grow at all costs in order to accumulate wealth? I'd argue the first, but America doesn't really have a clear stance. Certainly no consensus. I think this detail confuses the conversation a lot, because when we talk about growth, we could be talking about hard metrics like GDP or stock price, or we could be talking about soft metrics like livability, success, substance and quality, and happiness as a society.

It doesn't need to do either. This is a false dichotomy. A company needs to be legal, and be useful enough to its customers that it is sustainable. That is what a company needs. There is no "useful to society" as there is no monolithic "society".

When we're talking about laws we're specifically discussing the interaction between companies and "our society" or our communities. Broad strokes like "society" just make it easier to talk about.

A company as big as Amazon exists across thousands of communities, and in contexts that don't even include communities. It can afford to harm some contexts while profiting on others, because it is a monolith. That's why when we talk about business law we need to consider more than just the simple economics, because companies can have greater impacts than that.

Anti-competitive laws are just that, they're not about increasing simple metrics, they're about managing the harder to measure externalities of bigger companies like the ability for a market to be competitive, promote innovation, and to make sure customers have enough choice to choose with their wallet.

> Broad strokes like "society" just make it easier to talk about.

I'd say they make it easier to make mistakes in reasoning. Just as unilaterally deciding what "we're" talking about is also a mistake.

Positing that Amazon is too big to buy a computer game company is just wrong. This in no way creates a monopoly on computer game creation, which is one of the best industries on the planet in terms of lack of lock-in in the forms of regulation, machinery, or IP law. Have computer, download Godot, get going.

Also, Amazon is a silly company to level that charge at. They in no way control a significant amount of the game creation industry. You may be thinking of Microsoft.