Amazon Jumps into Freight Brokerage | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Jumps into Freight Brokerage

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201 pointsturtlegrids117 comments

Not mentioned in the article, but this is interesting because Jeff Bezos invested in Convoy, a Seattle startup working to optimize freight brokerage, back in their seed or series A, forgot which.

Though I'm sure nobody at Convoy, now valued over 1BN, honestly believed Amazon wouldn't jump into a market this big and ripe for improvement.

Then again, there's almost certainly room for dozens of big players. I don't think I even comprehend how big the freight brokerage space is, but I'm sure I'm underestimating it by multitudes.

It's big, it's technologically really old / behind the times, lots of customization.

And a lot of the human interactions are with people who have borderline computer skills, even decision makers.

It is a strange space. LOTS of room for efficiency and at the same time so easy to say "oh yeah this could be done better" and then you fall on your face because logic is not how anything / anyone works ;)

I worked at a major third party logistics company from 2012-2015 and they were less than halfway through a massive project to rewrite their COBOL mainframe systems in Java, and I doubt they're anywhere near being done yet.

The industry also runs on FTP transfers of flatfiles and ANSI X12 EDI messages. The most "modern" partner API I saw was SOAP. No one I talked to had even heard of REST.

Meanwhile, on multiple occasions I heard senior managers express terror at the prospect of Amazon entering their market and competing with them. Rightfully so, given the size of Amazon's resources. Making money off a logistics network is an economy of scale game.

>Making money off a logistics network is an economy of scale game.

And yet there are so many small niche providers.... you'd think that would have gone away long ago...

Such a weird world.

Yes, but the niche providers flourish when the market is good, but they're the first to get killed off when it's bad. The post-2008 economic collapse saw mass consolidation in the industry as smaller players either went bankrupt or got bought up by competitors.

There's also a big difference between asset-owning and non-asset-owning carriers.

You can start a logistics company with very little capital--just licensing, bonding, and insurance. In that case, you're basically a travel agent for freight. Some of these agents have grown into very large companies, however, because they help big customers allocate freight across many asset-owning carriers and mitigate their risks, and they handle dealing with international customs and compliance regimes. They're like an outsourced supply chain operations department.

In air and ocean, the niche asset-owning carriers generally have some statutory protection. A good example is Jones Act carriers--there's a law called the Jones Act that requires that only American flagged carriers can transport freight between any two American ocean ports. That means there are only a couple of ocean shipping companies that are allowed to go to places like Hawaii, Alaska, Guam and Puerto Rico.

They are allowed to go to Puerto Rico (or AK/HI/Guam), but they couldn’t then continue to Miami or Norfolk (or Long Beach) or another US port from there, which makes it uneconomical for them to stop in PR/AK/HI due to the Jones Act.

Interestingly, similar laws come in to play with cruise ships - non-US-flagged passenger ships that depart from a US port aren't allowed to return to a US port without first stopping at a foreign port. Almost all American cruise ships are flagged in countries outside of the US. The practical effect of this is that the many cruises that travel between the west coast and Alaska all have to stop over in Canada before they can return to the west coast, which is a major driver of tourism to Victoria, BC - since that happens to be the largest port city between Alaska and the mainland US.

IANAL, but I don't think it's "similar" laws, but the exact same law. Cruise ships are just (very inefficiently) transporting human cargo.

The Jones Act is such a shit show. Almost no one in the mainland US knows about this Crony Capitalist act than enriches a tiny group of people, but makes life in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa etc quite seriously more impoverished than there is any need for it to be.

https://reason.com/tag/jones-act/

The problem with the Jones Act isn’t so much that the ships have to be US flagged - that’s a natural requirement for a domestic operation. The problem is that it requires them to be US built but the US no longer has a competitive shipbuilding industry.

Yeah, it is really strange. When it comes to trucking, the vast majority of the industry is individuals or very small companies with a handful of trucks. I would have though the benefits of scale would cause mass consolidation, but that isn't the case so far.

There's a lot of inertia in the industry behind the traditional brokerage model (very sales-centric, and all about relationship building).

Consolidation is also hard on the trucker side, where there's a ton of fragmentation in the kind of work they perform and access to it

Can you please explain your last paragraph?

Can concur.

I urge any technical or product manager to dig into this mess of an industry, it defies everything.

The way the markets are set up, the inherent localization, lack of standards.

In 2019 tons of 1-3 day short hauls are negotiated over the phone, trucker to shipper, and neither of them may have exact understanding of market rates, especially given variables like the ability for the trucker to return with a partial load.

And of course the unbelievable lack of tech.

It is truly mystifying.

That said, it may very well be that Amazon can conquer it, possibly by imposing regular standards for all sorts of things and efficient clearing market, a common tech platform etc. etc. etc..

But I'm far more confident that Amazon will conquer 1 day delivery than actually fix trucking.

All of this may be moot by the time autonomous truckers arrive, and I suggest they might hit before cabs as it's possible 'just driving 2000km on a highway no-stop' might be easier than navigating Manhattan. Autonomous trucking may come with a whole new set of systems and procedures which will probably be more advanced.

When I did some research with a friend into this industry, we visited some brokers and dealers I swear I was in a Vince Vaughan comedy.

I work in the enterprise payments space that functions on ftp transfers of xml, edi and text files and it's not necessarily a bad thing, just as long as it works. Much easier to troubleshoot why you got bad data if you have a ftp to look at with a daily xml file that gets posted.

Yeah, I've dealt with SFTP + CSV workflows and it's not so bad. I ended up writing a virtual SFTP server which was not backed by a filesystem, and which would prevent malformed data from being written, and make closed/authoritative files immutable.

It's obviously not ideal, compared to a well-thought-out purpose-built API and a complete set of tools, but that takes work, and isn't always better faster than the refined hack.

Wouldn't it be simpler to upload a file with a tmp name and then at the end rename the file if there was no error? Renaming is pretty much an atomic operation.

It would be, but they might not have the latitude to dictate the connection AND it might be multiple-file batches.

Except that failure modes of ftp (technically not ftp-the-protocol itself, but what the server chooses to do with the file) is not well defined. What happens if the connection dies half way through? Is the partial file processed? None of it? Does the file get moved after the upload is done or after it has been fully processed? Does every single last company in this space's ftp site behave the same in the face of errors? Also is this literally ftp and not anything more recent that includes encryption, but if it includes encryption, what ciphers are supported? Nevermind the files may be in ebdic or something else wonderfully obscure...

(I also work in payments. Bank's SFTP sites have under-defined failure modes.)

As do I (bank file transmissions representing!) To compensate this partial file fiasco, we tend to rely on the .done file methodology (i.e. we won't pick your file from your server until your script writes out a dummy file we can locate). Or we'll allow you to just push the file to us. Our system will notice partial file send of course, where the transmission stopped. But we can't determine if the file was partial to begin with. So we rely on balance reports to come via alternate FTP or email transmissions.

Don't get me started on sending ASCII as binary to the mainframe to compensate for the EBCDIC formatting. Or the lack of carriage return and line feed characters that cause so many fun issues.

All of that to say that none of it's pretty, but all of it works. The balancing is key as are the extra staff needed to verify them against each other.

Can this be solved by sending two files, one with the data and one with a checksum of the data?

That's a reasonable idea! There are a wide variety of ways to solve the problem, using ftp uploads as the primitive, but ultimately that's... kind of the problem. Everyone's solution is different from everyone else's, but those different solutions have different ramifications, so when they fail, they have to handled very differently. That is to say, OOP, classes and inheritance, only gets you so far.

(An issue w/ whole file checksums is that there are cases where partial file processing is desirable, but that's not to say there's not use of checksums.)

That's what we do. Have a summary file and a detail file and they need to match.

It's also bad when your trading partner's sender process crashes and they build up a backlog of a million messages, and then once they fix it, they want to dump their whole backlog on you at once.

Or their process gets stuck in an infinite loop and resends you the same message millions of times, etc.

>> The most "modern" partner API I saw was SOAP. No one I talked to had even heard of REST.

How is REST better than SOAP per se?

The amount of incidental complexity. Reading through their SOAP service spec and coding up a program to interact with it took several times as much effort as coding against a similar REST API would have.

>I worked at a major third party logistics company from 2012-2015 and they were less than halfway through a massive project to rewrite their COBOL mainframe systems in Java, and I doubt they're anywhere near being done yet.

Expeditors International perchance?

It's definitely a far more complicated space than you expect at first glance :)

I'm in that space right now and yeah, the state of the technology is horrible, but I think there are some real barriers to disruption. At first glance a comparison to Uber disrupting the taxi market seems like a good one. But I would estimate that 75% of the work is responding to something going wrong, so it is going to be very different situation since you are not going to get the real cost savings until there is a system that can start handling the edge cases. Also, the margins are low. Average around 15%. Uber is currently taking 25% and still hemorrhaging money. So it is a harder problem to automate and it needs to be done at a lower margin. I'm sure it will happen someday, but I think it's 5-10 years out or more.

Yes the software for even intermodal is pretty simple. The complexity comes from the human idiosyncrasies, including those of the customers. The transportation departments of some of the larger shippers can be very demanding, and a total shit show at the smaller ones.

Amazon has the power to make them adapt.

Since you appear to know some about UBER:

What is UBER spending money on? They don't own the cars, they skim off of drivers. I presume the only costs they should have are infrastructure maintenance, software development, and insurance (if they do it in house?)

On the surface it seems like they have a license to print money.

They are subsidizing the fares, for one thing. Every ride costs them a few dollars of loss.

What do you mean by their margin is 25% if they are subsidizing the fares?

As far as I understand, this can be distilled down to:

1: Uber is charging 25% commission for the use of their platform

2: Uber is still losing money

Which means that in order for them to break even they would need to charge a higher commission at the existing fare rates, or bump the fares to a level where their commission covered their costs.

Well... There's always the third option too: cut their own cost base significantly.

Each of those options carries an economic impact and knock-on effects.

Yeah Convoy and Flexport seemed to be the only ones pretty good at it in the startup space.

>It is a strange space. LOTS of room for efficiency and at the same time so easy to say "oh yeah this could be done better" and then you fall on your face because logic is not how anything / anyone works ;)

Sounds like a perfect opportunity for somebody like Amazon to shake things up. Where a smaller entrant might have trouble breaking that mentality, Amazon can do things however they want without worrying about having to attract customers who want to do things the old way.

I worked for a freight brokerage in 2012 and the only thing I have to say is that there is plenty of money to go around. The company I worked for was a small player and they were doing 30 million a year as a simple middleman

I do wonder what those terms look like (Right of First Refusal?).

Our company works closely with amazon and every interaction i have with their “enterprise support” team make me wonder how much of their curiosity is there to help build our product better and how much is brain rape

It may be a big revenue business but margins are extremely thin. That's one of the reasons why there hasn't been much innovation. Amazon could be a different story, but the virtue of brokering a standard product is same as retailing a barcoded product. It's the same marketplace story. If Amazon is interested, it's not for the money but for an opportunity to own an important platform in the logistics industry.

>Lunak told Transport Topics that in the flurry of reporting earlier in May, some outlets compared Amazon’s spot rates with contractual rates, which she said was not “apples to apples.”

Rates are a weird thing in the industry in the sense that nobody pays the up front rate and the "real" rates are heavily discounted.

Yes, and the mathematical reason behind this is straightforward. Capacity planning is the hardest problem in logistics[1]. You have to plan weekly capacity several months ahead of time, and you have a minimum break-even load factor to hit, but you also want enough capacity to not have to leave business on the table when demand is high.

Contractual customers commit to give you a steady weekly load, which reduces week-to-week variance in your demand and makes your forecasting more accurate. A more accurate forecast means you need less excess capacity and can run at a higher average utilization. This is very valuable, hence the discounts.

[1]Actually route optimization might be the hardest problem in logistics because the traveling salesman problem is a classic NP-complete optimization problem, but in practice it's not so hard to find a good-enough solution and the stakes are lower. Suboptimal routes won't make or break your profit margin, but poor capacity planning absolutely will.

The alternative way of thinking about it is that buying at spot rates includes an embedded option to not use the capacity. This real option has some value, so customers are willing to pay higher rates in the spot market rather than through contracts. There's necessarily some level of contract discount - otherwise, everyone would pay spot rates for the free optionality.

Which, at the end of the day, was the original value prop of EC2. Capacity planning is a challenging problem, no matter the industry.

That's a great way of putting it.

Japanese and Korean conglomerates' stocks are usually discounted compared to their parts: their P/B is less than one. This is traditionally seen as a inefficiency tax on their underlying value due to their inability to communicate and mobilize internal structures in an efficient manner.

Amazon has achieved what many other conglomerates have failed to do: effectively mobilize and monetize every part of their business. This is something that is nothing short of a miracle are is a testament to their organizational structure and managers, most of Jeff Bezos.

One would be hard-pressed to find a large diverse company that is as efficient and well run as Amazon.

I’m honestly surprised Amazon hasnt bought Flexport. They seem to “get” how things should work.

> They seem to “get” how things should work.

What makes you say that?

They’re like Uber for Freight?

They even have a website that’s a tongue-in-cheek reference to this: https://www.uberfreight.com/

That website actually looks to be run by Uber, not Flexport.

What part of uber do you perceive they emulate? Why isn’t amazon just buying Uber if it’s so desirable?

I was talking about Flexport, not Amazon.

Uber Freight, is... Uber, not Flexport.

Flexport wouldn’t sell to Amazon

Really interesting, odd move imo. As others have said, this is a highly diverse industry, with entrenched players and smaller players as well. I think it's interesting to consider 'why'? Clearly Bezos thinks he can make money at it. A lot of money I'd wager.

They are already "in" it doing it for themselves, like cloud, why not try to sell it to others, like cloud.

Leveraging a huge amount of organic demand from yourself makes a lot of businesses feasible, that aren't otherwise.

Worst case, they lean less on their own brokerage. Best case, they excel and can begin billing everyone else for providing the service. Win/win.

Amazon is always Amazon’s #1 customer when they enter a new market.

How is this different than the railroads that owned the railways and were broken up in ye olden times?

In US law, the key phrase from Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U.S. 197 (1904, "the first railway monopoly case") was "in restraint of interstate commerce."

The trust was deemed by the Supreme Court to have been created for the purpose of ceasing active competition between the companies who joined it (there having been recent strife between them in the news, the trust being the negotiated solution, to back this purpose up).

So, very different. A similar case would be if AWS, Azure, and GCP decided to create a holding company that combined all their assets.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/193/197

I know it's unpopular to talk about limiting Amazon because America is a "free-market" but that's the argument of the dumbest kind, it's short-sighted. You can't compete with them unless you have an advantage they can't replicate, they have all the money and can buy any company they need, they can pay the best salaries for the same reason, they own a lot of relevant data in every industry, they can buy all the patents and license them to third-parties so they sue you, etc... I am an Amazon fan, but looking into the future, these companies will rule every aspect of our society.

Amazon currently does just above one quarter the retail sales of Wal-Mart. They’re growing faster, but not enough to overtake them within a decade.

Wal-Mart and Amazon are not really in the same industry.

Wal-Mart is an old retailer with a lot of physical stores and a well-established business model.

Amazon is a young software company with the world’s biggest Internet store, the world’s biggest computer apparatus, and a bunch of other things I probably don’t even know about.

But it’s the software thing that’s the important bit. Software is intelligence, intelligence is efficiency, and Amazon is software first. In any “old” industry it wants to enter, it becomes, by default, the smartest competitor therein. It will start out with better logistics than the incumbent industry experts with decades of experience.

It’s like Amazon has a 20-point IQ advantage in anything it wants to do. Or more.

A scary competitor. Scarier than anything from the Robber Baron era.

Ok, but what about consumers?

If everyone else sucks so much that they can't provide a better service, then why is it a bad thing for them to fail?

The best thing for consumers is to have quality products for low prices.

consumers have to have a job and an income in order for them to actually be consumers.

people who work for the wages amazon pays in fulfillment centers cannot afford to live in amazon's own home town, which has now become a massive homeless camp.

all of this "inefficiency" in the market, when eliminated, is not going to become money in consumers pockets. its going to become money in Amazons pockets, especially as Amazon becomes a bigger and bigger monopoly.

most people do not own any kind of stock, so the benefit to the stock market will not help them.

it also obliterates the tax base of every single town in the united states, rendering basic services like education and road maintenance completely un-funded -> this is essentially a lowering in the general standard of living for the entire country, for the theoretical fulfillment of a 19th century economics model where supposedly the pinnacle of human life is buying cheap products.

Seattle is so expensive most people in all works of life can't afford to live here, like police, firemen, teachers can barely afford it. I agree though that amazon fulfillment workers won't make enough to have a great life in many places, but most places are far more affordable than amazon.

Walmart was the company that first did the destruction of cities because it wiped out the downtown core of little towns with their big box on the corner. Now amazon is doing is again to broad swatches of countries.

I stumbled across this article while searching for something related to Amazon Logistics. This freight service and the article are both wildly interesting.

But I still don't know how to do what I wanted to do in the first place -- does anyone know if there's an API that allows querying Amazon Logistics tracking? Basically scan history and estimated delivery date given a TBA######## tracking number.

Typically if you're doing business with a broker they'll tell you what API to hit... not necessarily for free.

There was no way back when they were just using it internally. They'll probably open up something eventually after it has significant external usage.

Now they are heads on competing with Uber.

Also heard that they bought a food delivery startup today. Maybe Lyft is next!

This will be interesting to watch.

Like Google’s core business gives them the infinite cash to burn to prevent an alternative to YouTube ever showing up, AWS might be that but for Amazon.

Out of curiosity, has Google bought/killed potential YouTube alternatives in the past?

Is that the metric we should use? Who would even bother trying to start a YouTube alternative? Does Google break out YouTube’s financials in their quarterly? They don’t. How do you compete with a bottomless wallet?

Google has been clamping down on content they don't like and ramping up the ads like crazy. Their recommendation algorithm is also terrible. There is definitely room for competition.

This is a triple whammy for UPS, who is experiencing pressure from:

* Self Driving Vehicles

* Amazon Freight

* Neo-Luddite Teamsters union resisting new tech

Is this similar to what FreightHub is doing?

Looks to be different. FreightHub is a forwarder, this looks to be a trucking brokerage. For most trucking within the United States, the company you contract with to move your stuff doesn't actually own the trucks. You're dealing with a broker who matches your order to a trucker on the backend. The truckers are independent owner/operators or employees of large truck lines like JB Hunt, etc.

The better comparison would be to Uber Freight and Convoy, who seem to be operating on the brokerage model.

see: https://freight.amazon.com/

also: https://ship.amazon.com/

At what point does Amazon get broken up? Grocery chains, freight, aws, ecommerce, each of these could be companies on their own. Seems like we're heading to a dystopian future where megacorps own you in every sense.

Amazon probably won't get broken up as long as people continue to get the lowest prices from them.

As far as owning you in every sense, that won't happen until these companies start buying up so much property that they rival military bases in family services offered. At that point, once it becomes possible to live cradle to grave on a company's property, that's when you will be owned.

>as long as people continue to get the lowest prices from them.

I don't really think that's the breakpoint as to if something gets broken up or not.

Currently, it's actually the definition of when something gets broken up or not. Anitrust today focuses on consumer wealthfare and not corporate power. However, there are some politicians like Elizabeth Warren who are argueing to change that criteria. This is often referred to as "Hipster Antitrust"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_Antitrust

For a great series on the history of anti-trust and the current debates on its application to tech companies check out this short Planet Money Series:

Antitrust 1: Standard Oil https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/15/695131832/anti...

Antitrust 2: The Paradox https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/20/696342011/anti...

Antitrust 3: Big Tech https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/anti...

Hipster Antitrust is basically how antitrust used to function before Bork. Just about the same time when income inequality really started to accelerate

Yeah I thought that was super interesting. The podcast covers that too.

All of these services enrich the lives of millions.

If Amazon was just in-housing all of these business lines for the use of their core business (vertical integration), I don't think there would be a case for antitrust. Getting into freight makes sense for the supply chain of a global retailer. However, they insist on platform-itizing everything to the point that the argument could be made that the platform IS the business, and things get murkier. (IANAL or subject matter expert).

I sometimes wonder if there is some power (whatever we want that to mean) threshold at which an invalid antitrust case is brought simply because of the amount of power under discussion. Extreme and improbable hypothetical:

Amazon hits ~$2.5T in annual revenue, while the GDP of France stagnates at ~$2.5T.

Assuming that there is zero evidence for an antitrust case to be built (again, this is an extreme and improbable and rather outlandish scenario), would the U.S. have an interest in simply brute forcing the break-up of Amazon simply on the grounds that the company itself has too much geopolitical clout/power/influence/etc.?

I'm seriously curious.

> Extreme and improbable hypothetical:

> Amazon hits ~$2.5T in annual revenue, while the GDP of France stagnates at ~$2.5T.

> Assuming that there is zero evidence for an antitrust case to be built (again, this is an extreme and improbable and rather outlandish scenario), would the U.S. have an interest in simply brute forcing the break-up of Amazon simply on the grounds that the company itself has too much geopolitical clout/power/influence/etc.?

In this hypothetical, how much money a year do you estimate they'd spend on politics? It's not like the country is a body with a single mind.

I'd wager their lobbying efforts would increase roughly in parallel with their revenue (or something like that).

Conglomerates aren't new and aren't by themselves something to consider antitrust action over. Samsung does everything from highway construction to chip fabrication to making appliances.

What's South Korea's anti-trust laws like? Chaebols aren't exactly well regarded, are they?

- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/business/south-korea-chae...

It doesn't seem like they have a monopoly in any one area.

> At what point does Amazon get broken up?

They'd have to violate the law. As it stands, they're not engaging in anti-competitive activity. Simply being better at something than your competition isn't anti-competitive.

> Seems like we're heading to a dystopian future where megacorps own you in every sense.

Literally every business that Amazon has entered has improved my life. Books are cheaper with an enormously larger selection available. Prime Video offers alternative to Netflix. AWS has revolutionized the software industry.

Don't get me wrong -- Amazon is in it for Amazon, and I think Jeff Bezo's can be an asshole. But the reason they get my money year after year is that they do such a great job.

it's improve your life because you're probably a highly paid software developer or engineer (guessing because here you are on hacker news). I would like to hear more from the people who work for amazon (not the devs reaping all of the rewards of stock shares) and the retailers selling their goods on amazon to see if the company has "improved" their lives.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17243026/amazon-warehouse...

Engineers are not the majority of Amazon's customers. Nor are they the ones that benefit most from buying there.

For example, consider single mothers working two jobs, ordering from Amazon.com to save time & money. And depending on where they live, they might even get the order within a couple hours. That's a new kind of efficiency that many benefit from.

Consider why that person has to work two jobs, and the contribution Amazon made towards that.

Low prices aren't free. Some of it came from efficiency, the rest comes from simply paying labor less.

That's a different discussion and it's hard to untangle and weigh all of the effects. But it's worth noting that the % of people working multiple jobs has actually decreased with the rise of Amazon.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/4-point-9-percent-of-worke...

That's not to say it's casual. Maybe it would've decreased more sans Amazon. Who knows.

Anyway, the point was simply that it's not only/mostly engineers who derive value from their existence. It includes every Amazon customer who saves time & money - especially those who have too little of both.

It also includes every person who lives in a city whose tax base has been eroded by Amazon, so those "hard working single moms" send their kids to shitty schools that will perpetuate the cycle of poverty.

For tens of millions of working poor who live in apartment complexes, Amazon provides absolutely zero benefit since they cannot order anything bigger than a kumquat without risk of it being stolen off of their porch. The office? The office doesnt exist or is closed during the hours they are working - and UPS wont deliver there anyways a lot of the time.

In theory that’s what Amazon Locker is for, though it’s less convenient.

Those people aren't the customers, though.

Just because your life is better isn't a strong argument for or against anti-trust actions.

The current framework in antitrust, the consumer welfare framework, really fails to capture forms of market power and forms of dominance that should be relevant to antitrust and do raise competition concerns. We should really question the existing anti trust laws and whether they are suitable for the 21st century.

Companies, without monopolies, are starting to exert serious soft power, often bending governments, crushing competition and engaging in anti-competitive behavior without a pure monopoly.

> As it stands, they're not engaging in anti-competitive activity.

Try telling that to diapers.com

> Simply being better at something than your competition isn't anti-competitive.

Couldn't agree more on this part.

You should look up the history of Boeing and the Air Mail act of 1934. Boeing airplanes, United airlines and United technologies all used to be the same company. But all the arguments people use about Amazon today were put to Boeing then. Too much synergy allowing for less competition, too large of a company, etc. It was good for the consumer on the short term, but not the long term.

They were broken up by an act of Congress. All three companies have done just fine. And there's lots of competition in all three industries.

And as a guy working for Amazon, I thing if Amazon got split up, all the child companies would do just fine. The secret to success is the culture. I doubt it will ever happen though.

I would be very surprised if AWS does not get spun off at some point.

Then all the other companies would mostly halt in growth. Most of the other subsidiaries' growth are, well, subsidized by AWS

"Amazon has made MY life better" (in the short term) is a remarkably unsophisticated argument.

Well, the obvious generalization is that Amazon makes many lives better.

Amazon is just one facet of a larger phenomenon of social and economic centralization and the ever-intensifying tournament by which the resources are distributed as a natural and necessary consequence.

What law do you think they’ve broken to justify breaking them up? You can’t just dismantle someone’s business because you think they should structure it differently.

Reconsider the current system and change the laws, obviously. The Consumer Welfare Standard fails to capture forms of market power and forms of dominance that should be relevant to antitrust and do raise competition concerns.

What happens when Amazon hypothetically reaches state level income but doesn't break any laws? How much is enough soft power? How much is enough power for one corporation, monopoly or not?

It's interesting that I got so much push back for this discussion, seems fairly obvious this can end badly for the average person.

If you’re making custom laws to deliberately target specific businesses you don’t like then that’s a red flag your new law is abusive.

This has nothing to do with specific businesses, just the size and scale that businesses are reaching now. This has nothing to do with Amazon, they are just an elegant example of a broken system.

Corporations that have serious soft power but have broken no laws should cause us to ask deep questions about what it means to be "anti trust" in the 21st century. The consumer welfare framework is a weak and ineffective framework for today's modern corporations.

Businesses exist at and only at the sufferance of the society that grants that charter and need only be permitted to exist so long as there is positive social benefit to their existence. One cannot "abuse" a business by requiring them to properly hold up their end of the bargain.

We have mostly forgotten--to our detriment as societies around the world--that businesses exist to serve the collective us of citizenry and society. Not the other way around.

> The Consumer Welfare Standard fails to capture forms of market power and forms of dominance that should be relevant to antitrust and do raise competition concerns.

Why would I care about anything other than consumer welfare?

Screw for profit businesses. I don't care about their welfare. I only care about consumers.

Because consumers are also workers, that's how they have money to be consumers. If there are no worker rights, then there is no consumer income, and if there are no workers, because they have all been "made redundant" by a monpolostic oligarchy, there are no consumers.

This doesn't have much to do with workers rights, though.

If a company is in both the grocery industry, and the shipping industry, I see no reason as for how that hurts workers.

There are lots of grocery stores, and lots of shipping companies. Thus, one company does not control all jobs in these industries. It is not even close.

If you want to talk about minimum wage laws, fine go ahead. But that has nothing at all to do with conglomerate companies. It effects all companies, and arguably smaller companies are worse on this front, because they are less efficient, and therefore have less total money to spread around.

I think the argument is around anti-competitive behavior based on them controlling both the platform (Amazon Marketplace) and their own store (Amazon Basics/Whole Foods). This Verge article [1] cites the Diapers.com incident, where they basically cut prices until Diapers.com couldn't compete and had no choice but to be acquired.

There are also the ongoing investigations in Germany around anti-competitive behaviors. [2]

I'm not making a judgement on validity, just pointing to what people are likely referencing.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/5/17805162/monopoly-antitrus...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-germany/amazon...

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