The FTC Sues to Break Up Amazon over an Economy-Wide “Hidden Tax”

Re:The FTC Sues to Break Up Amazon over an Economy-Wide “Hid... by nemo44x on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @12:35PM (#37767681)

Isn’t this very common among all resellers? For example if you own a hotel and want other websites to sell your availability they will only list you if you don’t list the same availability for less money. They do this in part because people use the service to search for hotels and even they find one they want they go to other places to see if it’s cheaper.

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Re:The FTC Sues to Break Up Amazon over an Economy-Wide “Hid... by notatoad on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @01:02PM (#37768184)

This is an antitrust lawsuit filed by the FTC, not an accusation of specifically illegal conduct.

They're not saying amazon committed a crime by doing this, they're saying that it's evidence of amazon abusing their market position to create a monopoly. "most favoured nation" status is legal, creating a monopoly isn't.

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Re:The FTC Sues to Break Up Amazon over an Economy-Wide “Hid... by jjk166 on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @06:49PM (#37772818)

You have that backwards. Monopolies are perfectly legal, it is only establishing and maintaining monopolies by improper conduct (ie specific anti-competitive practices) that is illegal. MFNs are not per se anticompetitive, but by the rule of reason they might be under certain circumstances. The FTC would have to prove that this is one such instance where MFNs are illegal conduct.

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