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Comment by fortenforge | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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