The move that Amazon's price be no higher than offered elsewhere is the most pro-consumer move possible. Hilarious people are complaining about it. Any second-order effects of this are on the actual seller, not Amazon.
Your conclusion that this increases end pries for consumers has nothing to do with Amazon, but the sellers themselves.
Yes, but at the end of the day Amazon to remove the seller for any reason, so even if the FTC succeeds here, Amazon will simply purge those sellers who are not offering the best price, even if not explicitly stated.
There is no reality where Amazon allows their site to be inundated with higher priced goods compared to competitors.
Dictating how you sell elsewhere is a clear step beyond that.
There is no obligation to sell on Amazon, nor a requirement for them to raise prices on other platforms. They could simply offer the lowest price everywhere. The result? Lower prices for Amazon customers. If they raise the price, then that's the seller's fault, not Amazon.
While true, this ignores the important point that Amazon is only able to do this anti-competitive practice due to their market dominance that effectively forces many sellers to sell on Amazon.
> nor a requirement for them to raise prices on other platforms.
That is what this whole thing is about. Sellers that sell on Amazon aren't allowed to sell for lower prices on other platforms that are cheaper to sell on.
If Amazon was able to offer lower prices for its customers by offering sellers a marketplace with lower costs compared to competitors that would be great. Instead, they abuse their market dominance to prevent any competitors from offering lower prices by being more cost efficient for sellers. This is extremely nasty as it effectively prevents any competitors to Amazon from building a market share since consumers will have no price incentive to switch and sellers will not want to switch due to the smaller market share on those competitors' platforms.
It could not be more clear that this is anti-competitive behavior achieved through abuse of a dominate market position.
Yet here we are with sellers WANTING to sell their items at a lower price on places other than Amazon, but if they do, they'll go out of business. That doesn't sound pro-consumer.
I'm a consumer. I'd like to be able to buy items for the lowest price the seller wants to offer me. That's not happening in some cases because if they do, Amazon will exclude them and they'll go out of business. Yeah, definitely not pro-consumer. Pro-amazon, sure.
Do you agree with the look and feel lawsuit that Apple had against MS? Or think that Roku, Amazon, Google , etc did something untoward because they came after Apple with set top boxes?
As far as Amazon copying others as a marketplace owner, ever heard of the Kirkland’s brand? Store brands have been around forever.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/amazon-copied-produ...
> thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters – including emails, strategy papers and business plans – show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company's largest growth markets.
A big company can stall a copyright lawsuit for as long as it wants. Small companies cannot win against Amazon in court.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-14-fi-19337-...
Small victories like the chain wrench lawsuit against Sears happen. But they are rare.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-bionic-wrench-sea...
And CVS follows the formula of name brand OTC drugs down to the very ingrediant to make house brands. You can’t copyright a shirt measurement.
And before you call me an “Amazon shill”. I got PIPed from Amazon less than two months ago. I’m the last person who has any love for Amazon. Honestly I don’t have any feeling either way. It was just my 8th job over 25 years, they gave me a nice check and I had a comparable offer within two weeks.
Like with the sears example, large 'mall' like organizations do outright steal designs and stonewall the original copyright holder.
A random housebrand does not have access to Amazon's statistics, logistics or reach. Amazon is looking at stats that they hide from their providers, to choose who to copy, then out-price the original seller. (Due to inhouse logistics)
They are not even remotely the same thing.
And Walmart sells a lot more than Amazon.
You don’t think that every store knows how to undercut other products in its own store with house brands?