If Microsoft can get hammered for packaging Internet Explorer with Windows (and probably rightly so, given the market conditions at the time), there is a direct analogy to be made here.
Pick what you want to be: if you want to be the greatest goods index and shipment company in the world, fantastic. But you have to accept that you cannot sneak some of your own other-products to the top using that power. In this case, spin off your Kindle etc companies or have them broken up.
They've simply nailed it and scaled it. In New Zealand a company called TradeMe got there first and successfully fended off Amazon, but that's a minority case.
There are pros (e.g. consumers love it) and cons (e.g. human toll when optimising efficiency without robots) to having Amazon dominate in whatever country, but you can't deny, they get the job done. There isn't really another company competing with them at that level, is there? And that's why I think it's an effective monopoly.
To abuse this wide-reaching power, in making your own stuff rise to the top of world sales, is absolutely a concern and we should honestly be grateful that there are laws and funded agencies giving a shit about this.
Can you share more? This is quite a grand statement to submit based on your "feeling"...
Antitrust laws specifically address using monopoly power to restrain competition.
If it is, it shouldn't be, and we need some similarly concise term for "action to eliminate biased incentives and promote competition for the good of the individual".
C'mon, this is ridiculous. There is no need to promote competition when competition already exists. Hence a monopoly (or cartel) being a necessary precondition of antitrust action.
Let me explain. I just did a search for "lightning cable" on Amazon. I don't want to pay $19, or whatever it would cost, to buy an Apple branded lightning cable. So I'm going to go for something cheaper. The top result is by Amazon Basics. Then we have YUNSONG, PLmuzsz, and KRISLOG. I have no idea what those are. I have no idea if I'm going to get a steaming pile of inauthentic shit. But with Amazon Basics, I can at least feel confident that they did a reasonable job of finding and vetting a factory to source the product from. And, more importantly, that they have a vested interest in me having a good experience, since Amazon Basics is Amazon.
Generally no, but I don't think a monopoly is a prerequisite for biased incentives to cause consumer harm, particularly for platform companies. Consumers don't have to choose between a bunch of non-monopoly platforms that aren't acting in their best interest when they can collectively decide, via their government, to force the platforms to do as they want.
This is speaking generally - I don't actually have any problem with the specific case of Amazon promoting their AmazonBasics brands.
At this point, I'd literally rather drive over to a physical store than try to decipher whether I'm getting crap from them, and whether that crap is coming on a slow boat from the orient, every, single time I try to buy something. The future is CURATION. That's what the physical store does for me, by nature of the fact that their shelf space is limited. Amazon would be wise to throw 90% of the items off their platform, and stop being a storefront for every jerk with a computer and some junk lying around. Leave that crap for Ebay!
For some reason, the browser bundling is what stuck to the public consciousness.