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> Because they built it. Do we tell people building startups that the sky is the limit, unless you become too big or do something too many people consider wrong, and in that case we'll take it away from you?

So now monopoly power is not a concern anymore? How did we get to this point?

Does anyone believe that the fact that a founder can only have, say 10 billion and not 100 prevent anyone from starting a startup?

I don‘t think so.

Monopoly is a concern, but so is trying to improve the situation through negative reinforcement, by breaking apart the company.

Instead, foster competition by handing out grants to competitors on the condition that they can't be sold to the Big Co for 10 years, and provide mentoring to those startups.

Also, 10 billion vs 100 is arbitrary and could easily vary from market to market, and is determined by who?

Here we edge into the moral question of whether it is ok to be a billionaire, and the discussion taps into the current outrage against the 1%.

I think it is ok to be a billionaire, if and only if you give back to the community commensurately - something like a 50% flat income tax (no deductions, applies to all income including investment earnings/interest) if your net worth is over 1 billion.

>I think it is ok to be a billionaire, if and only if you give back to the community commensurately

How is it even remotely your business how much money other people have given somebody? A billionare (assuming they didn't inherit it) has already given way more back to the community than the average person, because they brought into existance something that collectively brought billions of dollars of value to people.

> Instead, foster competition by handing out grants to competitors on the condition that they can't be sold to the Big Co for 10 years, and provide mentoring to those startups.

With what goal? More gigantic conglomerates? Or after ten years, they get rolled up into an existing one? To me, this sounds like it would make the problem worse.

What is your concern with negative reinforcement? Pretty much our entire legislation is based on the concept of fines and punishment.

They're not a monopoly though. Like 40% market share in eCommerce and like 15% in retail overall isn't close to a monopoly. Yes they compete in other spaces, the onus is on their competitors not to suck.

40% in ecommerce would definitely be able to have monopoly power which would often be enough to trigger an anti-trust response, historically.

What producer of a consumer good sold through Amazon could afford to lose 40% of their retail presence/revenue overnight? Well in the current environment, Amazon has that power. Its extremely unbalanced and lets them really crush any rising opposition unless you trust they won't unfairly wield that power.

>What producer of a consumer good sold through Amazon could afford to lose 40% of their retail presence/revenue overnight? Well in the current environment, Amazon has that power.

Are there any examples of them actually doing this?

Of them having 40% of the market place?

The comment is referring to the fact that companies trying to sell goods online are given a choice to either forego 40% of potential revenues or work with Amazon. This gives Amazon an enormous amount of leverage over suppliers.

No, of them forcing anybody off their platform.

>The comment is referring to the fact that companies trying to sell goods online are given a choice to either forego 40% of potential revenues or work with Amazon. This gives Amazon an enormous amount of leverage over suppliers.

Antitrust law (at least in the US) is conducted on the basis of harm to consumers. If Amazon's negotiating power with suppliers results in better prices/outcomes for consumers, then there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. As a producer, nobody is obligated to buy what you're selling.

http://sites.middlebury.edu/econ0450f10/files/2010/08/bastia... is a nice argument why laws should try to benefit consumers, not producers.

> Antitrust law (at least in the US) is conducted on the basis of harm to consumers.

This is far from a consensus view amongst lawmakers and economists.

Thats why its called anti-trust. If we are in a position where society needs to trust a company to not abuse their power, then they should be a candidate for anti-trust actions.

Yes but historically an anti-trust response is brought against a company that is actually using that monopoly power, and frankly "definitely able to have" is speculative. Do they have it? Are they abusing it?

I don't know but, there are two potential cases that pop up that could be such as them leveraging internal data on their third party sellers to out compete them and putting their products first in line which as we know from search carries a lot of weight for what people click.

And then there's the part where this has to be bad for consumers. Sucks for competitors but anti-trust has also historically been used when a companies practices are bad for the consumer. My life has only gotten better using Amazon services I don't know about you.

My point being is that there are things that legally could be construed as anti-competitive but I as a consumer am not hurt and third party sellers and other competitors generally speaking and in my opinion, suck. I'm not in the business of breaking up companies simply because they're better.

Are you sure you're not confusing "monopoly" with monopsony? The former is about a seller vs buyers, where a single source has huge power over pricing and thus is able to raise prices for buyers far beyond market justification. The latter is when a single buyer controls a high enough share of purchases that they can exert significant power of sellers. While they both impact markets, they're not the same thing and they have different effects. The impact of monopsonys and to what extent their bad is a lot more controversial, because the fundamental idea of grouping together in order to gain enough purchasing power to negotiate lower prices from sellers is used in a lot of areas. I think monopsony does have implications for things like wages and working conditions, with outright depressing of wages as well as potential for more wage discrimination.

Those are all different issues though with different potential regulatory tools to apply against them vs a monopolist simply outright raising prices for buyers. I'm definitely concerned that way, way too many people have started to just reach for the big BREAK 'EM UP hammer for any problem they see, despite the potential for nasty battles delaying effectiveness and enormous and unpredictable side effects. I'd really like to see much more focused efforts tried first, particularly since a big central target can actually be easier to regulate and check for certain things. There is plenty of low hanging fruit at Amazon like their commingling practices, but such things tend to be more technocratic.

I'm concerned that focused efforts like that are seen as "boring" and in turn not getting the attention they should. This is similar to how I feel about other areas like secure hardware stacks. Rather then "break up Apple/Google!!!" I'd much, much rather see things like "devices owners must have the option to load their own crypto roots with equal power as any manufacturer roots" or "devices must be warranted for 1 month/$20 retail price up to 60 months" or the like done. They're not as catchy politics but they'd be really directly useful without risking a lot of the value scale can bring.

Antitrust is not purely about consumers, but about protecting a competitive and open market. However I will admit that this has been widely debated and is not actually consensus in US history. A counter-argument is that antitrust action should be purely focused on consumer prices and do nothing unless consumer pricing is negatively affected. I would argue that the former is still being consumer-pricing focused, just with a long term view instead of a short term view

I believe some of the concern with Amazon is how horizontal and diversified the company is. I'm not sure if any other company has ever gone so wide as to have everything from technology to groceries.

The concern is how effectively a company like this could reinvest into their other verticals. Grocery stores are low margin. Cloud computing is one of Amazons highest profit sectors. Is it fair to smaller(smaller being relative in this case) grocers such as Meijer, Publix, or Kroger to compete against Whole Foods which is a company that can actively lose profit due to backing from other Amazon verticals such as AWS?

Yeah the closest thing Amazon reminds me of if: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_integration

Though the parts of the "supply chain" are really different verticals they can use the revenue from to compete in their other verticals. The consequences are likely different but I haven't seen how it's bad yet at least against other large companies.

Amazon shouldn't compete with third party sellers, as it creates a conflict of interest that has been documented to lead to abuses. WSJ has a series of articles on such abuses. See e.g. https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...

Amazon claims it's against their internal policies. But it's widespread and there's no indication those policies serve as anything more than plausible deniability - i.e. managers can tell employees to increase sales, give them access to the seller's data, and just have them agree on paper that they won't use the data but never enforce it.

Fun fact: Amazon has argued in litigation that it would take over 5,000 hours to collect sales information on a couple of thousand products. When they want to restrict data from their own teams, they can easily. Anyone who's ever dealt with a database understands that this kind of query wouldn't take more than a couple of hours if you had access to the database. Amazon clearly built a system to limit the amount of access their legal team has, presumably to avoid having to give out significant amounts of data. If the retail team needed this data to improve their algorithms or something there's no question they'd have been able to get it without putting 5,000 man-hours into it.

https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.427726...

>As a result, I estimate that producing responsive information to Plaintiffs’ request for sales data for 5,376 ASINs from October 1, 2011 to the present will take between 5,376 and 8,064 hours of Amazon paralegal time. Assuming a 40 hour work week, based on these estimates it would take one paralegal working full time 2.5 to 3.8 years to collect just the sales data Plaintiffs are seeking from Amazon. I calculated this based on my estimate of 60-90 minutes per ASIN for 5,376 ASINs.

>they built it

They built part of a logistics chain and acquired the rest.

>skys the limit

Why should those being exploited be limited by amazon? The sky should the limit for every individual not just Bezos.

>Prime books

If you broke up prime you would have nothing. The reason people subscribe is the overlap with multiple markets which is what makes it a monopolistic strategy. It uses loss leaders from one market to destroy competition in other markets with the intent to later raise prices.

> "Why on earth should [..] all be conglomerated into one corporate entity controlled by one person?"

> Because they built it.

This is an entirely fictional idea.

Consider who this language serves. Bezos started the company, but how does it make sense to say he “built” all of the businesses mentioned? They were built by many thousands of people, but they barely own what they created.

Bezos has abused his position as founder to capitalize on their work. If he hadn’t started the company, these people would still have found ways to build things, perhaps even under less heinous conditions.

>If he hadn’t started the company, these people would still have found ways to build things, perhaps even under less heinous conditions.

If they had the opportunity to build things in better conditions, why aren't they already doing that?

Look at it this way, if nobody did what Bezos did, nobody quit their job to try starting a business (bearing in mind something like over 90% of businesses fail, so it's a significant risk), then there wouldn't be any jobs. We'd all still be subsistence farmers. And this is essentially the condition that the world was in before we had a government/legal system that allowed people to create and grow businesses free from molestation.

If not for Bezos, Amazon wouldn't exist, and all the beneft people gained from the superior convenience, prices and delivery speed it offered compared to competitors would have been lost.

Nonsense. That's the 'great man' theory. Its clear from history that when the time has come, the business appears. There were many online retail operations when Bezos came on the scene. If Amazon hadn't happened, then another company would have.

Heck, Amazon isn't even Amazon any more. Its a two- or three-removed reinvention of what Amazon started out to be.

>If Amazon hadn't happened, then another company would have.

It would have happened later, so everybody's standard of living would have been a little lower. The more you discourage people from starting businesses, the fewer people try to start businesses, so successful new business are created more slowly, and the economy grows slower. It's also more likely the company will appear first in another country more friendly to business, and then the original country will lose out on the revenue, jobs and soft power it might have gained from that country operating there.

Depends on how much you respect what Amazon does. Perhaps we'd all be better off.

The complaint about how warehouse workers are treated, hired, and such, is not unique to Amazon. It is manual labor where as much intelligence if not language skills is eliminated as possible.

Examples, from light walls where light is used to guide placement to pickup, indicator lights on bins for the same, to voice prompts in language of choice, all guided by computers because they know exactly where the gun/scan device the employee is holding.

Still I find it disappointing people only concentrate on the warehouse worker while completely ignoring other low wage workers they are likely working around but tend to be invisible to you, from mail clerks, building maintenance, and even the security guard at the front desk.

Look, not all jobs are equal nor should you assume offense on some other person's part. Believe me, I got the shock of my life working in IT while working for a "rent a cop" company. That some people earned and lived on what some of them made was both amazing and a little disappointing to me. Yet a few I would talk to thought it was fine as they had a job where they didn't have to put much effort into doing to get paid; plus in that line some were fond of being indoors and having a uniform. Basically what we find unacceptable other's will just blow off our opinion as being snotty or worse.

> My suggestion: mandate unions in every field, every worker must be part of at least one union, and union dues must be paid as a tax by the employers.

I was with you up until this point. So now instead of having one institution that I'm beholden to for my livelihood, I have two. Unions are just another form of institution that can succumb to the same kinds of corruption and bad practices as the company I work for.

Why not start with a higher minimum wage, or incentivizing companies to pay a living wage across all roles, or UBI, or cheaper/universal health care - something so that workers at shitty companies can say "screw this" and leave.

Isn't the government kind of already a union, and you are a member electing leadership and funding it with your dues (taxes)? Why the need for a seperate org? How is it different than a government?

Because the government and specific worker unions have different, though not necessarily competing, objectives.

the breakup happened to AT&T, is this considered an overreaction?

No, because Bell lost what was already geographically distinct - the regional baby Bells. Bell labs, Bell trademark, Western Electric, and AT&T Long Distance were all retained. This might be the equivalent of splitting AWS and the rest of Amazon into two companies.

Or Web Services, Commerce (Whole Foods, Amazon.com), Media (Alexa, Ring, Fire TV, Amazon Studios)

Amazon has so many different components in their conglomerate that there are many ways to draw lines.

The government gave AT&T the monopoly.