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Comment by rattray | Hacker News Reader

It didn't sound like GP was saying their team did anything illegal – they accessed _public_ information about the companies they were copying.

It definitely feels scummy, but it didn't sound like GP had access to evidence of a crime. IANAL.

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Neither "traction of products hosted on its platform" nor "customer list of those hosted products" are typically public information. They are information to which a trusted vendor might have access. There seems to be a fine line between trusting Amazon to sell and ship one's products and services without using its position to sell competing products and services, and trusting AWS to host one's confidential data without reading that data...

Ah, sorry, "customer list of those hosted products" I had missed somehow, that in particular definitely sounds proprietary.

You're right - but this isn't the first time we've heard about this exact practice. It's been reported on extensively, so if anyone was going to investigate something illegal, it would have happened.

It is however, good ground for an Anti-Trust case. Using your position as a market maker to push your own products is literally illegal anti-competitive behavior and can trigger a court order to break up the company.

That argument seems to prove too much? It's sort of an Efficient Market Hypothesis for government regulation, and it would apply just as much to e.g. FTC and DoJ with respect to anti-trust violations as to Congress (as thread parent would like) or DoJ or whomever with respect to fraud or illegal wiretapping. Maybe it would be better investigated by a class-action plaintiffs' attorney, but even the mightiest firms might hesitate to wage the discovery battle that would be required against such deep pockets.

I believe anti trust is triggered when it negatively affects consumers, with Amazon’s aggressive competition consumers usually win. At least short term...

Antitrust isn't about stealing business from your competitors, it is about colluding with them to rip off consumers by fixing prices.

For web and mobile app stuff this type of competitive intelligence is very available (builtwith, datanyze, etc). Also, startups never shut up about who their clients are, social proof to land more deals.

*typo

> startups never shut up about who their clients are, social proof to land more deals.

I read it as they scraped user databases to get email addresses and the like.

>It definitely feels scummy, but it didn't sound like GP had access to evidence of a crime.

Violating Anti-trust statues isn't criminal...but it is still illegal. Anti-trust violations also aren't the only potential laws this would violate. It sounds like it would violate unfair trade practices as well (most states has statues/laws/codes on point).

I'm not super familiar with antitrust laws, but it feels like they might apply here.

Is AWS a monopoly?

Isn't the important factor whether it's trying to become one? Windows and IE were never the only possible options.

A de facto monopoly doesn't mean that other options don't exist. Microsoft had a monopoly on the PC operating system market, despite other options existing.

One can violate antitrust laws without being a monopoly. Certain parts of the law (regarding collusion on price setting, for example) can be broken by very small businesses.

See this helpful FTC page: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

This is true, but those are all cases in which putative competitors collude to essentially form a cartel. Which is a distinct category of antitrust offenses from anti-competitive behavior.

As others note you don't need to be a monopoly to violate anti-trust laws. However, as it relates to being defined as a monopoly this ability to leverage your market position to stifle competition is the exact type of behavior that would support a finding of monopoly...most non-monopolies can't leverage their market position to unfairly compete

It's not just anti-trust, it's also trade secret laws. A customer of AWS has a reasonable expectation that the information it keeps on AWS's VMs are confidential.

Is that comparable to the owner of a mall watching who goes in and out of which shops to decide what stores to add to the mall?

Isn't it more like the mall owner opening a clone of your store right next to yours while charging themselves no rent in order to gain an advantage, all the while promoting their own store they opened to steal your business on the ad boards situated around the mall?

Is that illegal?

> A customer of AWS has a reasonable expectation that the information it keeps on AWS's VMs are confidential.

This is where End User Agreements may be worth checking. There may be a specific clause AWS customers agree to.

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