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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

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

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