Also, why is Amazon launching this for just dogs? My cats are offended that they were left out!
They have the data of what is what people buys. They have that info for all kind of products. If it for dogs, it makes sense that it may be the best option.
The dogs I've had, for the most part, will eat anything from lettuce to cat poop. Amazon could sell cans of cat poop with bits of lettuce in it, and they'd wolf it down.
You can pass on one or two offerings, but they're getting increasingly hard to avoid across the board.
Businesses should be allowed to create whatever products they want, as long as they don't do anti-competitive things like work together with their competitors to fix prices.
Free markets are important.
Or say, if they owned a huge marketplace and eventually started producing a product, and then refused to stock their competitor's product in the huge marketplace.
Laissez faire capitalism has both benefits and risks, casual/militant dismissal of concerns can sometimes have negative consequences, sometimes very severe.
There aren't free markets in a pure sense and it's a good thing:
- Standard oil was broken into exxon, chevron, etc...
- Laws were introduced to prevent railroad barons from owning every industry by forcing fair treatment.
- Electricity producers aren't allowed to sell directly to their customers in many countries. They are forced to sell it to resellers.
>> as long as they don't do anti-competitive things like work together with their competitors to fix prices
That's subjective, What does anti-competitive mean? it could mean making cheaper competing products as a retailer. It could mean refusing to host your product just like it happened to chrome cast. It could be ranking competing products lower.
For commodity items like sugar and salt where differentiation is nonexistent, it doesn't make sense to pay a 100% premium for different packaging.
I find it fascinating how humans have such trouble operating in context of big picture and make so many short sighted decisions.
Companies should not be allowed to grow so large and so powerful that they can threaten multiple industries at once. I'm not necessarily saying they should be broken up as soon as they pass say $50 a year billion a year in revenues, but at the very least they should be disallowed from buying any other company as soon as they pass a similar mark or as soon as certain conditions for it being in "anti-trust mode" are met.
How are we going to have real competition in say AI, if Google keeps buying all the promising startups that come up with breakthrough AI technologies? Same for Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp. And now Amazon is doing the same thing.
The only answer to that right now is "maybe we're lucky and some other large corporation will buy that startup instead?" But that doesn't make me feel much better.
In the end, it all leads to at least an oligopoly across multiple industries, and a monopoly in specific industries. That's not good for consumers.
And I won't even go into how this much power and money concentrated into singular entities is bad for democracies, too. Even if you don't believe that these rich people and companies are literally buying the politicians and their votes, at the very least you should agree that they have disproportionate leverage in the government, for the same reason big banks do.
A more decentralized marketplace made-up of many more smaller companies is much better for consumers and democracies, too.