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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

> They refuse to sell Chromecast and Apple TV

This is such an interesting topic.

If I open a fresh-fruit stand and refuse to sell the Chromecast and I being anti-competitive? How about if I grow my own fresh-fruit and refuse to sell yours in my stand?

The whole reason for me to spend money running my own store it to sell my stuff, not yours.

What about if Apple open an "Apple Store" and refuse to sell Microsoft products? Ford dealership refusing to sell GM?

It's Amazon's store, they can sell whatever they want, or not sell whatever they want. If you don't like it, shop elsewhere.

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It's about intersection of "anti-competitive" and "big enough to alter market dynamics".

In your hypotheticals, if Ford controlled all dealerships then refusing to sell GM would be anti-competitive.

If Apple controlled all physical stores where computers are sold, it would be anti-competitive to refuse to sell Microsoft.

Amazon directly competes with Chromecast and is dominant on-line retailer in US so they do have have the power to alter dynamics of Chromecast vs. Fire TV competition. That's what makes that anti-competitive.

Notice that a big part of amazon.com value is being a platform to others to sell their stuff. I certainly bought stuff via amazon.com that was not sold by Amazon, merely distributed by them.

To go against that platform "neutratlity" (if you will) and refuse even 3rd parties to sell a very specific product, while allowing thousands more, is pretty damning evidence that it's straight up, anti-competitive leverage of their position in one area to gain advantage in another area while negatively affecting customers.

Yeah, what I can't fathom is what they even stand to gain by such a brazen move. They want to be a services company, not hardware. So why are they discriminating between $30 dongles rather than just making their streaming work on every type of device? That's what they want out there, not Fire Sticks.

No kidding... I finally broke down and got an NVidia Shield TV so I could have one device for just about everything, I also wanted a 4K capable device, but that was secondary.

> In your hypotheticals, if Ford controlled all dealerships then refusing to sell GM would be anti-competitive.

what? That's complete nonsense.

If I want to bring something to market, I can't just force my competitor to sell it in their stores. "Dan's Cars" could start up and force Ford to sell their cars in the Ford stores - crazy.

That's not how this works. If "Dan" expects to sell cars, then he has to do that himself, not rely on, or expect his competitors to do that for him.

How Dan's competitors sell their cars is frankly none of Dan's business.

You're completely ignoring the "if Ford controlled all dealerships" part of the hypothetical. Which means you're railing against a pure strawman.

I see a few problems with this argument.

1. Market share matters, for what should be obvious reasons. Amazon is, in that regard, a far cry from your sole proprietorship fruit stand.

2. Amazon is much closer to Walmart than it is to Apple or Ford; Amazon didn't do retail to support their product line, they rolled out a product line once they dominated in retail.

3. Sure, consumers can go order a Chromecast from somewhere else; just like how users could always download Netscape on Windows. That didn't stop antitrust claims from being brought against Microsoft for their practice of tying, because they were fundamentally abusing a dominant position in one market to assure their dominance in others despite weaker product offerings. And here we are, with everyone subscribed to Prime for the free shipping, and getting an unasked-for set of streaming services bundled with. Which aren't compatible with Chromecast. Which Amazon uses to justify banning Chromecast from its store. It makes the tying of MS years past look amateurish by comparison.

But if it's "their store" and not a "marketplace" then they should be required to deal with counterfeit goods, and deal with returns regardless of seller... they're trying to have their cake and a piece of everyone else's too.

> If I open a fresh-fruit stand and refuse to sell the Chromecast and I being anti-competitive? How about if I grow my own fresh-fruit and refuse to sell yours in my stand?

Analogies are limited but to play along, it's as if you own the largest supermarket in a place that only has 3 orchards (assume you're isolated from the rest of the world), and you own one of those orchards, and ONLY sell fruit from your orchard while refusing to sell fruit from the other 2 orchards.

Those other two sell directly to the customer (and to small grocers) so they still survive. But they miss out on the customers that come to the supermarket and might have otherwise bought fruit from those other 2 orchards.

The interesting thing here is that they are selling both their own products AND providing a platform for others to sell their products. Unless they compete with the products Amazon is making.

And that's their choice.

If I go to the trouble of building a store (bricks n mortar or online) then I'm going to sell what I want to sell.

I built the fruit store, NO, I don't want to sell live Aardvarks from my store, and it's preposterous that you think you can force me to do that.

It's more like I will sell the apples and oranges of all the farms except for that one farmer who dared to try to open up an apple store. At some point, if you are the only apple and orange store in the area, the government may decide you are abusing your power as the biggest such store and are acting anti-competitively

Surely it only makes sense that I prioritize selling MY apples in MY store, and no somebody elses.

I built a store to sell my stuff and make money, after all.

Sure, if your store mainly sells your apples do whatever you want. But once you open everyone else to sell their apples at your store for a cut, and everyone starts to rely on it as the only apple marketplace, screwing over the apple farmer next door who tried to open his own apple store is questionable

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