I wont speak for social media and search, but Amazon has a complete stranglehold on retail in the United States. People keep saying 'retail is dead', thats bullshit, Amazon has a monopolistic stranglehold on the selling of all goods. If that weren't the case, small shop brick and mortar shopping would still be a thing.
When Amazon is actually a monopoly.
Until then, they're not. And being good at business is not a problem.
"See, they still have competition!"
One way they’ve grown is by allowing small companies to easily add their products to their stores. Good luck getting Macy’s to sell your custom line of trollface shirts. Shelf space is live or die for small brands. Amazon has a lower barrier to entry without the strong arm tactics big retailers have used for years.
Retail is often a middleman operation with exclusivity deals and price fixing. Brick and mortar is failing for so many reasons. It’s not that there are restrictions preventing fair competition, it’s that the old guard is slow and incompetent and likely won’t survive the old model of exclusivity on goods.
While I believe that Amazon probably would have won regardless of sales taxes, emphasizing "fairly" seems a bit strong.
If I'd bought it on Amazon, I could have had it within hours. But I wasn't really in a hurry and thought I'd support a local business. I'd probably do the same again, but I can see why many people don't want to put up with this.
If Amazon was shut down tomorrow, I'm not going to start going to bricks and mortar stores again. I'd find new online suppliers.
2. Amazon has literally thousands of online competitors, many of whom also have physical stores that get tons of traffic: Walmart, Target, BBB, Costco, Home Depot, Lowes, Pharmacies, etc., etc., etc.
But I don't think it's impossible to split up search, either. I'm sure that Google doesn't just have 1000s of people working together in one big room with no structure. Their current organizational lines could tell us a lot about useful ways to break it up. Historically, for example, there were search infrastructure providers like Inktomi that sold services to consumer-facing search engines. Maybe a crawling-and-archiving group is separable; there are times I sure would have paid Google to use their crawl rather than doing my own. Parts of search were previously separate companies that perhaps could be spun out again. E.g., a lot of the structured-data stuff was once Metaweb.
Similarly, you could divide Amazon into a platform company that does fulfillment for others and a separate company that sells their own products, as well as splitting off things like AWS into their own companies.
Keep search intact but mandate that it must offer equal access to 3rd parties to match any access it has internally.
(How you do this without a privacy disaster I'm not so sure about)
I'm thinking along the lines of privately held public infrastructure like local loop unbundling in telecoms.
Judging by the downvotes I got for mentioning it, you and I must be the only ones on HN that think so.