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Comment by travisoneill1 | Hacker News Reader

What is the alleged anti-competitive behavior? The article doesn't mention it. It sounds like she is calling for their breakup merely for being big and powerful, and if that were cause enough to break up an entity we would logically start with the government.

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For starters, Amazon provided a marketplace platform for third parties to sell goods. They then gathered data on which items sold the best, created their own line of products based off this data, and crushed their customers-turned-competitors using their massive advantage in economies of scale.

FWIW, while I agree this a problem, large box retailers (Whole Foods before the Amazon acquisition, Walmart, etc) are well known for doing this as well.

So if that's the line you draw, it extends further than just tech giants.

It's a little bit different though, because Amazon has 2 streams of how they get products: Amazon can buy branded from vendor and control price and selection, or those same vendors could list directly on Amazon (as FBA) and the vendor controls price and selection.

Pop sockets got in a fight recently with Amazon, because they wanted to stay FBA in order to have better control of selection and pricing, but Amazon was trying to force them into a more traditional vendor role.

Right, and Walmart only allows products in its store under their terms which is far more restrictive, so I'm failing to understand how this model is worse for competition than Walmart's.

And what happened with PopSockets didn't quite work that way. They were already a vendor on Amazon, and they wanted to remove themselves as a direct vendor and designate a single reseller as their "approved" FBA on Amazon.

So they wanted to change the terms of the agreement, Amazon said no, and that was that.

Perhaps grocery stores have done well to keep their brands on lower shelves and not end cap their own stuff. Amazon brands will often appear first in the list of results, which would be akin to putting Great Value products front and centre on all Walmart shelves.

CVS and Walgreens put their branded products right next to the name brands they are copying. They even color the packaging the same.

But Amazon just fullfils orders on most of the products while collecting data , where as brick and mortar stores resell the competitions products

Don’t brick and mortar stores collect inventory and trend data too? Amazon isn’t the first one to do this, they just put the data closer to the center of their business so it’s more public that they collect data.

Until recently, brick and mortar really just knew what people tend to buy together. They can't tell, like Amazon, than a single customer buys XYZ over their lifetime. Brick and mortar now employee ways to aggregate using credit card numbers across stores.

Yes, and what is the problem with Amazon just employing better tools to do the same?

Yes and collecting data is a lot more expensive and less detailed for brick and mortar stores Also Amazon is less likely to have an issue with respect to stock since they do not buy most of the stock they just store it, where as brick and mortar stores invest in their inventory which gives them an higher incentive to promote them. And this also gives them an incentive to have disfounted sales on slow moving products that are either of slightly lower quality to a comparable product or it is a new Unknown brand resulting in a win for the customer. In case of Amazon if a new Unknown product is not selling it is all up to the seller to manipulate the algorithm to move up the seller ranking( we already see all the way sellers manipulate reviews and change products to have a high number of reviews) this is a big loss for the customer. And if the seller puts in all the effort and succeeds Amazon can just copy the product and say MY PRODUCT NOW, and show an Amazon basics product for the exact same price as the buyer and bump him Lower than its own product.

You are allowed to crush your competitors with economy of scale provided that you don't do it by selling at a loss. That's actually the entire point of economy of scale. The reference in the article is to passing a law against this so clearly what Amazon did is legal now. Furthermore, we don't need a law for this as this type of thing is well handled by a non-compete clause, which I am surprised wasn't in the seller's agreements with Amazon.

The larger issue is that Amazon does not treat each product equally. When you search for an item, they don’t necessarily even show you the “best item” — most bought or highest reviews. Products which buy advertisements or Amazon’s own brands are bubbled up: its not an even playing field in this sense.

If they were the largest retail seller, that would be anti-competitive. Amazon does less than half the revenue of Walmart. Amazon and Costco are the same size.

So I guess all those store brand groceries are anti-competitive behaviors?

Looking at the vast majority of Amazon Basics goods, I just don't see how they would have needed to use marketplace data to come up with what products to sell.

Batteries, clothes (lots of clothes), backpacks, these are all products that are cheap to produce and where brand loyalty plays a large role. People generally trust the name Amazon. It's not rocket science to realize people want cheap clothes and batteries.

its a little more than just Basics, but youre right its a ton of clothing.

https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17602470011

https://www.recode.net/2018/4/7/17208804/amazon-private-labe...

Literally every moderately big retailer does this.

Though many of them choose brand that are not as obviously connected with the house. Like half the stuff at Walmart is actually a house brand.

The Medium article[1] mentions a couple - Google prioritizing their reviews above Yelp in search results, Amazon copying third party products that were successful on its marketplace.

[1] https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

RE Amazon... how is this much different than say, store branded items from a grocery or WalMart, or quasi store brands(ie brands mainly only sold in WalMart, like Brahma boots or Ozark Trail)?

It's 100% the same thing which is why this entire argument is so weird to me. This has been going on for decades.

The difference comes down to market share. It's fine to sell store brands if you have 10% of the market because there's plenty of competition. Vendors who refuse to deal with you can do just fine by working with your competitors.

Amazon is approaching 50% market share. They are close to becoming the place for online commerce. So when they compete with vendors by offering similar products, the vendors are effectively put out of business.

Just like with MS and IE. The issue wasn't so much that MS offered IE with Windows so much as the fact that 95% of computers came with Windows, so bundling IE was putting other software providers out of business.

A quick search for a local restaurant shows yelp as the top hit. Google shows a info box to the side with their own reviews. I don't see a problem with this, and I can't imagine it being illegal. Companies are allowed to cross-promote between their services. Changing this would go far beyond tech companies.

> Google prioritizing their reviews above Yelp in search results

This is one reason I use Google. I can view all Google review w/out downloading an app. I'd classify Yelp reviews in browser search as nothing more than an ad.

She's a politician. She doesn't need logic behind her statements. Rather, she's tapping into progressive sentiments and trying to ignite her base during primary season.

well, the element that corrupts government should be removed and a govt for the people restored. Just breaking it up is as anti productive as just breaking up a company, if the company isnt breaking any laws. Govt is a different type of entity than a corporation and as enlightening as the comparison might be, a thought exercise is all that comparison should really be.

Perhaps not the government itself which exists within strict constitutional boundaries, but the same logic should apply to the major political parties with hard caps on the amount of incoming donations over which they have to "structurally separate" from the electoral process.

Whatever that means.

The government is already being dis-intermediated. You could look at this as the government eliminating their competition.

These companies have more revenue and cash on hand than many countries. Looking at the Bay Area, Google and Facebook are taking the lead on repairing and improving infrastructure because the government can't do it alone anymore.

There's a difference, at least on paper, between the government and corporations: the government is big and powerful, but (in a republican society) is accountable in some way to the people and society as a whole. Corporations are also big and powerful, and (in a capitalist society) accountable only to a majority of their shareholders.

So there's a reason to believe that you cannot have corporations serve the public interest without either breaking them up to limit their power or fundamentally redefining what it means to be a corporation, but you can have government serve the public interest while remaining big and powerful. If the federal government followed the views of the American public to the detriment of career politicians, we'd say, "Great, you're actually doing your job." If Amazon followed the views of the American public to the detriment of career managers, we'd be very confused.

(That said, breaking up the government sounds like a fine plan too, I just don't think it needs to be first)

In theory. But in fact it is the opposite. Companies are accountable to their customers above all else, and the government to its voters. If the IRS makes a mistake with your taxes and Amazon makes a mistake with your order, which of these would scare you more?

I'm talking about accountability to society. I'm only a customer of Amazon in very limited ways (I own a Kindle that I received as a gift, which I buy a book for once every few months, and I spend about $30/month on AWS of which $29/month is a VM I should really decommission), but that doesn't change the ways they impact my life - their influence on the book market, the literally-everything-else market, the cloud computing market, their purchase of Whole Foods, their presence as an employer in my city, etc. None of those worries are a worry about Amazon making a mistake with my order.

So I'm a lot more worried about Amazon than the IRS - I feel the IRS is in fact accountable to me in a way which Amazon isn't.

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