Plenty of people are saying otherwise, either directly "These cross-national inter-company agreements are illegal and should be reversed" or indirectly "These companies are free-riding by improperly exploiting loopholes and should pay more."
If the only issue were loopholes, the fixes are outside of Amazon/Google/other companies hands and in the hands of the legislatures of the various companies.
Not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, Amazon probably has too long of fingers. On the other hand, if we (the US) are going to be bad at enforcing anti-trust laws, we should at least be consistent about it.
The linked article heavily implies that legal action could be taken against Amazon for this, by bringing up other antitrust investigations that are happening. Hence the debate about legality.
I mean if the feds can't win on the Amazon Business Services Agreement being written by Amazon Legal and stipulates most favored nation status when it comes to pricing, what the fuck are they actually doing? Who cares what messages exist? The crime is in writing in a forced click-wrap agreement ticked by every Amazon Seller.
They don't have to be successful at enforcing them. The threat of a potential lawsuit scares employees, and - more importantly - scares their competitors from hiring Amazon employees.
If you were an employer, and you had two candidates - one from Amazon, bound by a mountain of non-competes, and one from Google, who isn't - which would you choose?
Maybe the Amazon person is a bit better, but they also come with the possibility of six figures in legal fees.
Amazon didn’t break any laws when they paid whatever amount they did or didn’t pay. Also I’m not sure which oligarch you’re talking about.
And they’re not the only ones who did this. It’s just convenient to flash Amazons name next to this headline since there are enough companies out there who refuse to compete or do anything innovative but want you to blindly give them your money.
Of course; I know very little about Japan's antitrust laws, it's really beside the point whether they are democratically defined or not. It's on Amazon to argue about their interpretation through Japanese courts or by whatever is the mechanism of redress they have in this case, if any.
I was responding to the parent comment calling the arrangement as described in article unfair.
This ticks me off every time i see it. Neither Amazon, nor Google or any other tech company are allowed to make laws. It's a breach of the terms of service maybe, and maybe illegal, but whatever the terms of service say is not a law and said terms of service could be themselves illegal.
They have enough power, please stop attributing them even more by your choice of terms.
I think this is a pretty big deal and has been for at least a few years, yet there have been no repercussions for Amazon yet. It feels like it should be illegal to enable this kind of thing.
This feels like a shoddy contract dispute just thrown in. I think it's a pretty immediately dead end and they probably know this. The contract is available to all here: https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/
I’m surprised there isn’t a comment yet about how this seems like monopolistic behavior and Amazon should be look out for anti-trust probes for stuff like this (at least I’d hope).
I agree. What Amazon is doing is clearly legal , but it also clearly violates cultural norms about fairness. I don't know much about the Elasticsearch team or company, but from a 50k ft view it seems like Amazon could and should throw them a couple mil, at least out of pity.
So because Amazon is taking their immense revenue and expanding they should be immune from fines/consequences for their actions? Clearly they are receiving tons of revenue from their European operations.
Yeah, even I was under this impression. OP should cite a source if they know otherwise as from their comment it seems like Amazon is the only one abusing their position like this.
You can disagree on whether or not Amazon is pricing things ethically, or whether or not antitrust laws should cover Amazon's actions, but the article title is "Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws" which, in the current state of US law, it (probably) isn't.
> ban either government from demanding companies [..] disclose algorithms
So what happens if a company such as Amazon is accused of anti-competitive practices by privileging its own products in search results? Just give up and go home, because the trade deal says they're not allowed to check?
There is something wrong in what amazon is doing. Not legally, but morally.
A giant chooses to use your open source software and undercut you by bundling it with other offerings they have. At the minimum they should collaborate with the open source devs or donate to the project.
If the only issue were loopholes, the fixes are outside of Amazon/Google/other companies hands and in the hands of the legislatures of the various companies.
reply