How Amazon Strong-Arms Partners Using Its Power Across Multiple Businesses

wsj.com

25 points·jimmy2020··5 comments

This is what is anti-trust law is for.

I am concerned that most current anti-trust law was written for standard oil and others dealing with monopolies in fungible commodities.

The problem is we are getting walled gardens of 2-4 companies in many domains (voice assistant, mobile phones, cloud providers, IOT platforms, App Stores, consoles). Each company can be framed as both a double digit participant in the segment and a monopoly on their own platform. In each of these there is competition, however there is often little incentive to take a different path, and instead adopt a duopoly position.

I really think they need much broader definitions of anti-trust, including use of a non-dominate platform to unfairly compete in a different area.

antitrust law uses tests like pricing power which identift empirical monopolies even where a player may a minor (by marketshare) player in a typical descriptive market segment. (Also, even relatively weak US antitrust law regulates various behavior of non-monopolies.)

I highly recommend Matt Stoller’s work on the subject.

There is nothing wrong with definitions of anti-trust, it’s the enforcement that has been gutted since the 1980’s.

If there had been reasonable enforcement GAFA and many others would literally not exist today to begin with. There would be no regulatory approval for all the merging.

This article implies that an enterprising AG can easily bring the entire house of cards down.

One needs to find a medium-level salesperson with dirt (drugs etc) tap the phone, and then just listen to the tap as they discuss all sorts of collusion which could be revealed via public filing of the case. Then it would be a matter of public record

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