Ok, 20 years of sheer monopoly and yet Amazon can't raise its prices or it will be beaten by other, more specific, retailers, Google and Microsoft. The case for antitrust law and State action should fall apart now.
Not to mention that price isn't the only reason why monopolies are bad. I had a period of about 3 months where Amazon just couldn't deliver to my house. They switched to using their own carriers, and they would just never be able to find my place. I actually had a hard time finding another retailer that would ship to my house for less than double the total price of some of the things I was buying.
Plus the (very real) threat that they can just remove an item from their store for any reason (the one that comes to mind is that Amazon doesn't allow anyone to sell chromecasts' on their store. Rokus, Fire Sticks, and various other streaming "devices" are fine, but chromecast is banned completely) means they also have a monumental amount of power to hurt anyone selling through them at a moment's notice.
I'm not in a position to say whether or not Amazon is a monopoly, and I wouldn't even know the first thing about solving the problem, but IMO the fact that they haven't raised prices isn't exactly proof that they aren't a monopoly.
It's pretty sketchy.
[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-10/jeff-bezo...
And Amazon can also ban you forever from their service, for example if you return too many things in a short period.
Imagine if that meant you couldn't buy anything at all because there aren't any competitors.
The store I work for once lost selling privileges for spurious copyright claims regarding books we had bought directly from large established publishers. Even with the publishers themselves (and sometimes the authors, too) writing on our behalf to state that there were no violations, it still took about two weeks to regain privileges. During a busy season, two weeks is a long time to be without profits for a small retailer.
First let's start with something that your article got right.
Virtually every monopoly is worth more in pieces than it is together. That is because maintaining the monopoly requires having profitable parts of the business subsidize other parts which are running at at unprofitable prices to shut down potential competition. The result is the sum of the pieces of monopolies that were divided by law were worth more than the original monopoly was. And THAT means that a divided monopoly almost immediately COSTS consumers more.
So, as your article concludes, saving consumers money in the short run is not a reason to shut down monopolies.
This immediately raises the question of why monopolies come around. If a monopoly is worth less than separate companies, why make one? The answer is that a monopoly is worth less than the entire area of business that it would monopolize, but it is worth more than any individual piece of that business. Therefore creating a monopoly is personally profitable to the one who does.
OK, with that out of the way, why should we object to monopolies? The answer is simple. Monopolies are about establishing control. In the area that is controlled, the monopoly can make any unilateral decision that it wants. This is really, really bad for innovation. Innovation requires many different players trying many different things.
With innovation, in time it is quite possible for consumers to get both better features and more competitive pricing than the monopoly would have managed. Getting rid of the monopoly is essentially always bad for consumers in the short run. But the long run could be a different story?
As a concrete example, one contributor to the dot com boom was that the web offered a way to create businesses that Microsoft's monopoly could not squish.
As another example, before the breakup of Bell Telephone, customers couldn't even choose what color they wanted for their phone! If they had not been broken up then it is unlikely that we'd have seen the rapid spread and improvement in things like smartphones.
The long and short of it is that we should expect (relatively) cheap prices from a monopoly. And saving money is not reason to break one up. Our areas of concern should be continued innovation and availability of customer features.
No one denies that monopolies are risky. In fact this is the argument against anti-trust regulations, which is basically a monopoly granted to very few people (which in practice, means a guranteed monopoly to a colluding subgroup of political class). There are probably more cases of harm done by this monopoly than by corporations monopolies.
Also one major difference, Corporations have to earn their monopolies where the political class dont. Only one of these two will not think twice before abusing it.
We already have a protection agaisnt monopolies aka free market.
The best example is anything that requires a wire run to every home. The issue is high fixed costs whether or not someone becomes a customer, with low operational costs after. Therefore if a second company runs wires through the same neighborhood, between them you have large sunk costs which a competitive price that does not let you recoup the costs of infrastructure.
Taking numbers from http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1072/9..., the cost of running a wire by a home in the early 2000s was roughly $750, and the fixed cost of connecting it is about $750 again. The cost to operate that line is under $15/month. Those costs are surprisingly close to constant across a wide variety of kinds of cities. (Dense cities require less distance, have more regulation, and more other things running through the space that you have to worry about not breaking.)
To give a historical example, Bell Telephone ran wires everywhere. They operated under various anti-trust regulations for a long time. They were barred from cable TV and so another set of wires got run. Then Bell was broken up by force, with interoperation rules to prevent monopoly again. Today, with the internet, we have seen a convergence of these two sets of wires. So most of us live in places where we have one or two choices for getting internet over a wire. One possibly from a former cable company like Cox. One possibly from a former telephone company like Verizon. Very few of us have a third option. Without government involvement it is unlikely that 2 options will remain indefinitely viable for most of us.
Prices rapidly declined after the Bell breakup. And the Standard Oil monopoly had a clear negative impact on all manner of prices thanks to the manipulation of rail freight.
Bell used high prices on long distance to subsidize low prices for service. Their reasoning is that if Mr Rich Businessman wanted to pay top dollar to call grandma, they wanted grandma to be hooked up.
After Bell split, in the short run long distance prices remained fairly high, and local carriers increased prices 10-fold. The inevitable war in long distance prices that you're thinking of didn't really get going until the 1990s.
As for Standard Oil, http://www.economist.com/node/347251 claims that it was worth far more in pieces than together. the best figures that I can find are these. At the end of the year when it was split, the pieces were worth about $600 million. Over the next decade they wound up paying out $900 million in dividends and still wound up at a combined value of $2.9 billion. (See https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/05/15/the-day-bi... for a source.)
Many products are now only available to Prime users, or are more expensive if you search it via Amazon than if you get it linked by someone else.