Maybe I’m alone in this, but I feel like if you’re going to break up a company with antitrust regulation you should at least be able to point to a way they’re abusing their power or are making a worse experience for customers. The article goes as far as to admit that Amazon is currently not doing anything wrong.
Should we really seek to regulate away hard-earned (and valuable!) advantages because they make it possible to abuse the position? Surely we should wait until they’re actually abusing it?
As an aside, I can’t think of any advantage Amazon has that wouldn’t open up opportunities for a competitor should they start to abuse them. That’s the goal of capitalism, in a sense; you have to be great or people just go elsewhere. Seems odd to fight against that.
How we actually define a company to be a monopoly seems to be somewhat arbitrary? I agree that Amazon engages in anticompetitive behaviour but I'm not sure that it can control prices or exclude competition to that extent? I mean every company can affect that, at what point does it become problematic?
The thing that pisses me off, more than anything, is that huge companies like Amazon take advantage of a society and lobby for laws more favourable to them until society reaches a breaking point in tolerating it. Small businesses are already pretty much dead in the water by the time that happens due to the anti-competitive nature of these behemoths. And then the government decides to crack down and regulate and once more it's always the small businesses that suffer the most or go out of business.
A self-regulating free market with competition would be beautiful but at this point we're past that and this scorched earth policy has to end somehow because it's a race to the bottom.
It's not just Amazon. If we wanted to avoid this antitrust hellhole we are in now, we should have broken up Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Sears, basically everyone that crushed the small businesses at the beginning. Now they complain because Amazon is the latest thing crushing them. And soon, Alibaba and AliExpress might be the latest thing to crush Amazon at this rate.
I think the biggest mistake was framing antitrust law as being whether a company harmed consumers. Amazon, well, its reduced prices like crazy and brought lots of competitive products out, so how does it harm consumers by that definition? It's hard to prove. If antitrust law was instead framed as preventing companies from making it inordinately difficult to compete with them, as well as companies with dominance expanding outside of a core market (like Amazon expanding from bookselling to Amazon Basics), then we'd have a stronger definition.
This seems really short-sighted to me. Amazon is going to punish their own customers because of a feud they have with their competitors? How is that good?
More and more I question whether I want to continue doing business with Amazon.
I am not sure people are really prepared to take the implication of how unfair Amazon seems to its logical conclusion, because it means undermining a lot of what makes us comfortable in modern life under capitalism. Regulation targeted at increasing competition (breakups, rather than regulation Amazon as a monopoly of a kind and entrenching them) might result in a better outcome, or it just might make things more expensive and then you have to repeat the same breakup and regulation process again every 15 years.
I really hope this triggers some long needed anti-trust action against amazon - controlling the market place and using that control to execute actions like this is exactly what those laws are there for, this is the first step in a consolidation to force suppliers into less profitable agreements and individual bargaining.
I'm not really a bezos or amazon hater, but fact is that amazon uses an anticompetitive business model in almost every endeavor they engage in and this needs to be stopped.
I generally like amazon. They've made so many of our lives so much easier. But when they ban sellers from having lower prices on their own sites, wield regulatory agencies against competitors frivolously and things like this, it is unacceptable and this behavior needs to be strongly disincentivized.
Also, this anticompetitive stuff is counterproductive, there's a reason they've only ever sent their owner to space while spacex has sent astronauts and is working on their second gen vehicle already.
Amazon is a poster child for antitrust litigation. They're publicly known for using their dominant position to compete with their suppliers, and drive their competitors out of business with price dumping. There is little chance you'll find alternatives to Amazon if they're allowed to destroy competition.
Regulation can only go so far, it can help build and stabilize a healthy ecosystem but it can't help with a fully consolidated business like with a decade of experience in killing competition.
There's a good case to be made that they should get the standard oil treatment.
And the alternative, if I'm getting AbrahamParangi's point, is to create regulations that only apply to Amazon. That seems arbitrary and unpredictable. I understand that regulations applied equally to every company increase barriers to entry, but making special rules for specific companies weirds me out.
Except Amazon is a monopoly, that all but obliterated all major competitors. They need a much bigger workforce, can afford to keep their wages comfortably higher, while extorting whatever conditions for it.
> The problem is that you can just starve any competition when you are large enough. Amazon did that with a lot of competitors.
Amazon did that by offering superior prices, customer service, product range, delivery, etc. That's only a problem if Amazon raises prices or cuts quality after it's competitors are vanquished. What we've observed is just the opposite. Amazon continue to relentlessly push lower prices, better customer experience and faster delivery.
Competition is not a goal in and of itself. It's merely a means to the end of improving consumer welfare. Antitrust law is careful about this distinction. It's not illegal to be a monopoly because you delight you consistently delight your customers much than your competitors. In fact just the opposite, restraining a superior product from growing its marketshare would be actively harmful to consumer welfare.
I don't even know where to begin with this comment. Do you know what anticompetitive behavior is? Do you know how markets are supposed to work? Amazon is leveraging their position in the market to unfairly disadvantage their competitors, thereby distorting the market, decreasing its efficiency, and increasing end prices for consumers everywhere. Market-distorting behavior like this is why antitrust regulation is necessary to keep markets functioning efficiently.
Monopolies are ok, anti-competitive behavior from monopolists is not. I think the only thing I've seen that looks anti-competitive from Amazon is when they stopped selling (some?) TV devices without support for Amazon Prime Videos.
Capitalism doesn't work when the market is non-free, and the market is non-free when it's monopolized. So if you believe in capitalism and want it to function as intended, you should be actively promoting antitrust enforcement against the likes of Amazon.
The main thing to watch out for is monopolies. If customers always have enough choice then the customer and workforce satisfaction will get sorted out eventually, as those organizations will be selected for and companies won’t be able to exist without doing that right. It works really well, and is actually a strength of our free markets. Governments and committees stepping in and trying to fix the system tends to make it worse because the people who fall through the cracks have no recourse, and they also inadvertently create monopolies by making the system more complicated and expensive for new entrants. For all the complaining, “neoliberal capitalism” has made it the best time to be alive there has ever been, and the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing. Amazon is getting there. But even so, reading through these comments, there’s plenty of discussion of how Amazon is so much better than the previous experience of many people. Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better. It has raised the standard to a new level, which we will happily now complain about until someone else figures out how to do it better.
The problem is that Amazon is now basically the market itself while at the same time a competitor or a potential competitor. Small businesses don't have much choice in the matter if they want the ability to reach an entire market. If they go their own way and build their own retail experience, there is a ceiling on the percentage of the market they can sell to.
Without any regulation to curtail this behavior, the end state seems like it will have to be Amazon owning the markets that have the best margins and the least risk. Competitors will die and Amazon will be able to increase prices to maximize their profits without needing to worry about being undercut. That sounds exactly like what anti monopoly legislation was written to protect against.
"This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to 'consumer welfare,' defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy"
It's an opinion piece stating that law ought to be changed, not that Amazon is doing anything illegal.
I never really quite understand how people think antitrust law applies to Amazon. I don't have expert-level knowledge of Amazon's various markets, but I don't think they have a monopoly in any of them.
Should we really seek to regulate away hard-earned (and valuable!) advantages because they make it possible to abuse the position? Surely we should wait until they’re actually abusing it?
As an aside, I can’t think of any advantage Amazon has that wouldn’t open up opportunities for a competitor should they start to abuse them. That’s the goal of capitalism, in a sense; you have to be great or people just go elsewhere. Seems odd to fight against that.
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