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Comment by bradj | Hacker News Reader

Has a single law review article done more to propel anyone’s career or drive policy than the Amazon Antitrust Paradox?

Although it's not a review article, but maybe Bork's The Antitrust Paradox, which the Amazon Antitrust Paradox works hard to refute.

Robert Bork had already been Nixon's acting-Attorney General at that point. He became acting AG when AG Elliot Richardson refused Nixon's order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and instead resigned. Deputy AG William Ruckelshaus also then refused to fire Cox and resigned. Bork then became acting AG but he did not refuse to fire Cox.

Bork's legal career was not propelled by any singular brilliance.

Bork's legal career was not propelled by any singular brilliance.

Well there was the whole Blockbuster rental history thing during his confirmation but that’s more like fun/interesting pub-trivia than anything necessarily “brilliant”.

It's quite silly and not the greatest look for the country. I mean, to some people it is the greatest look -- the DEI story and the heroic "brilliant youth" narrative.

But appointing someone so inexperienced to such a high office is not something you do you if you are serious about governing.

How do you personally benefit from an Amazon with fewer competitors? I’m not sure if even ordinary people who work for Amazon benefit.

You’re complaining about someone who represents your interests, as opposed to representing the interests of someone you’ll never be, a billionaire.

Amazon has many retail competitors. Maybe they have pricing power in AWS, but otherwise, I do not see evidence of them having control of the retail goods market.

Even for AWS, they have Microsoft and Google as competitors and a few other companies too.

Amazon is in such a monopoly position that it is able to force sellers to cover the price of prime shipping (incorporating the shipping price into the display price) and then penalizes their display rank when they list lower prices on websites where shipping is separate from product price. Forcing suppliers to raise prices on unrelated sales is a classic monopoly move, like when MSFT forced OEMs to pay for Windows licenses on computers sold without operating systems.

And those sellers cannot go to Target or Walmart or Home Depot or advertise their own website?

We have Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal making it very simple to pay for things with a simple click, just like Amazon. Amazon has inertia, but it’s not exactly in a high barrier business. Walmart supplanted Kmart, and Amazon was able to gain share from Walmart.

The switching cost is visiting a different website. If you have a good product at a price people we willing to pay, the internet makes it very possible to survive without any big retailer’s help.

The bigger problem is probably someone cloning it but with 50% cheaper materials and selling it for 70% of your price, one that I’m sure many sellers on Amazon’s flea market are aware of.

They can advertise and sell on other websites, but if they advertise below the prices they advertise for on Amazon, then Amazon pushes them out of the search results box. Something like 90% of Amazon sales happen due to products being put in that box.

What? The whole point of "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" is that we should abandon the "consumer welfare" standard. Meaning that we should gut Amazon even though it provides enormous benefits to consumers in the form of low prices. Lina Khan may represent the interests of Amazon's competitors, but she certainly doesn't represent the interests of consumers.

The problem with the "consumer welfare" standard is that it traditionally only considers a single variable: Cost. But consumer welfare can and should extend beyond that. But if you try to get customer service from many of these monopolies, you'll see plenty of consumers falling through the cracks. Google abuses people's privacy, eliminates competitors, kills off services people rely on, provides literally no customer service... but because their core services are "free", the consumer welfare standard is often considered inadequate to deal with an absolutely reprehensible and societally harmful company.

And what's really crazy is: Competition tends to force companies to compete on treating consumers well. Protecting competing businesses protects consumer welfare pretty darn well, and it provides room for innovation which stagnates when a single company dominates a field.

> get customer service from many of these monopolies, you'll see plenty of consumers falling through the cracks

That's true of many non-monopolies too. And Amazon is widely known to have pretty good service. Conversely, no cellular company has ever had a monopoly in the US but a number of them are famed for poor customer service.

I can call Verizon or Comcast right now and get someone on the line in minutes. Usually they can solve my problem too. Get Google on the phone though. (Amazon actually does deserve credit here, their customer service isn't the worst, by any means. But they have a litany of other issues, like a work environment where people have to pee in bottles to make quotas...)

Even Metro has quick 24/7 phone support. Which, given the sad state of their online self-service options, has been the only thing that's kept me with them as long as I have.

I'm not sure there are any companies where you don't pay them anything and they have easily accessible phone support. Do you happen to know of an example? I never had any trouble getting support from Google when I was a Fi customer. On the other hand, I'll bet I couldn't get support for web search over the phone for love nor money. Similarly, I doubt I can call up Facebook or Twitter's customer support lines, although perhaps I am wrong.

> where you don't pay them anything and they have easily accessible phone support

They're still getting paid for your services. If my ad attention is equal to dollars, why don't I also get customer service for it?

I'd argue the idea that you shouldn't pay for services, and that you shouldn't expect to get customer support, are both examples of failures of the current antitrust regime.

Phone support is, unfortunately, a hard to find commodity anywhere in tech these days. Generally I have only selected web hosts and domain registrars that have 24/7, US-based customer service. I used to have a few options, now there's very few. :/ You're lucky if they have a ticket system they respond to in less than a day.

Because, well, since you're not paying you're not the customer.

To add onto that, if we manufactured more here, it might raise the price of goods, but if those goods are of higher quality and they last longer it might be better for the consumer in the long run. You might even extend this to looking at the environmental wins of having better wuality products that stay out of the landfill.

Absolutely agreed. Additionally, the more we manufacture here, the more competitive with overseas we eventually become. We'll never reach price equality, because we have labor standards, but we can get closer than people imagine today.

That's not even that bad IMO. I'd love to see other places bring up their labour and environmental standards!

Indeed. In my ideal world, the United States would set expectations on labor and environment that a foreign company needs to meet for their products to be imported to the United States.

We can't tell other countries how to operate, but we can set a bar for who we do business with, and we have the market power to encourage foreign entities to meet those standards.

Shame we didn’t just have a president who was trying to bring back manufacturing.

> absolutely reprehensible and societally harmful company

This is such an exaggeration. Google is not "absolutely reprehensible and societally harmful".

Amnesty International disagrees. (I think it would be off-topic here to give a lengthy account of Google's human rights abuses, the way they harm women and minorities, and the money they invest in politicians which are also very detrimental to society, with sources, but suffice to say, my description of them is, at least, a defensible position.)

My read is that people are seeking a means to an end. Means: whatever she’s writing. End: reducing Amazon’s scope of business.

If you’re being intellectually honest, the source of low prices is Chinese outsourced labor, not monopolies. Amazon could vanish tomorrow, and shit will still be cheap.

Who are some alternatives in the antitrust space, then? Elizabeth Warren?

Since when are 32-year-olds "so inexperienced"? Maybe she's got different experience from prior appointees but 10+ years of high quality experience is IMO, more than enough. Most people are at the top of their game at that age.

She has been out of law school for 4 years.

To play the DEI's advocate I'll call this sexism.

Additionally: while 32 might set a new record, it's not by _that_ much -- Collier became chairman at 34 in 1976.

For better or for worse, the law is much more complicated now than in 1976.

I get where you're coming from, "so inexperienced" is probably overstating it. But she's been out of law school for four years, and I feel like saying most folks are at their best then discounts all the experience and learning that come from working another 30 years in the field (for, say, a 62-year old).

4 years out of law school is what I was referencing.

I stand by my phrasing. She had (presuming usual timelines) 3 years of work between undergrad and law school. She went from law school student to law school associate professor (on the strength of her viral rewview article).

She has 0 non-academic work experience and will now be regulating entire industries.

In context, that's "so inexperienced".

Most people are at the top of their game at 31? Uh, no. No. Maybe in startup lala land, but in this kind of role, 31 is "learning the ropes" territory.

I've met Lina Khan. Silly doesn't come to mind.

One of SpaceX’s rocket leads was 27 at their first successful launch.

And how is that comparable with an appointment to the number one top position in the authority over thousands of regulations governing thousands of companies etc.

Also I think i's safe to assume you don't just "get appointed" to the lead team in SpaceX you need to actually "show" that you have what it takes.

I'm not saying she won't be good, I'm just asking how can we trust?

At least she's not on the backend of her mental stamina. +1 for being hungry. Unlike congress, who today ignored the homeless ( or pick your) crises to make Juneteenth an official holiday. I'd like to see a lot of under 40 year olds governing if that is the result of "experience".

I suppose they’d rather have Feinstein in charge

It's not like she was dragged in off the street. She's an associate professor at Columbia Law.

more than that, she has direct experience within the FTC and related government bodies [1]:

- 2018, worked as a Legal Fellow at the FTC in the office of Commissioner Rohit Chopra

- 2019, began serving as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law

- Lead the Democrat's congressional investigation into digital markets and lead the investigation into digital markets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Khan

Yes, she wrote a virally-popular law school review article in 2017. It aligned with a ton of political interests, which no doubt helped buoy it as high as went.

She then got invited to do some fellowships, advisory roles, etc... while stepping from law student to associate law school prof. None of that exposes you to the inner workings of industry.

Surely, she's a very smart and capable person. But there's a lot you don't learn in academic settings.

Regulating trillions of dollars worth of industry with only a theoretical understanding of the market, acquired only from a regulatory perspective, does not inspire confidence.

Please be more dismissive and patronizing of a person you know very little about. A DEI story? You are showing your insecurity.

It has been explicitly trumpeted widely. The admin itself has highlighted it.

I'm not saying it's bad, I'm saying it seems like there are narratives motivating this orthogonal to good governance.

Are you saying she, with zero industry experience, is the most capable person for the job?

Why, was Joseph Simons was so amazing?

I agree, there ought to be more original ideas in law, besides “Whatever earns me a plum clerkship.”

"Whatever helps me pay off my student loans."

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