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Comment by NickC25 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine a world where a guy worth over 150 billion dollars who owns a company worth over a trillion dollars and has a quasi-monopoly over the internet is in such desperate need of more money to the point where he's going to put advertising on his video platform, even though people already pay for the platform. Instead of raising prices moderately, or putting better content on the platform, they decide to instead put ads on the platform.

Some people just don't have the ability to say "yeah, we've got enough". Sad.

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You ignored the first paragraph of the article that says you can pay for an ad-free option, which would qualify as “raising prices moderately” to me.

Odds are near 100% that Amazon has been running Prime Video at a loss since it started. They spent $16B on content last year. They can stop producing so much content or they can find ways to make more money. Either way people will snark about how greedy they are for not running a service at a loss forever.

Yeah, people get so weird about this stuff. It's TV shows, not food and water. There should be no obligation for anyone to produce and distribute this stuff at a loss.

Price increases are fine. Inevitable, really. I just really hope that in the long term we'll get to keep the month-to-month model and the "pay more for no ads" model.

Low interest rates created an exceptionally entitled consumer mindset. It's been interesting to watch it break over the last year.

> Some people just don't have the ability to say "yeah, we've got enough".

It seems fairly clear to me that having more stuff makes people more greedy. And, yes, there is causation there, not just correlation.

You can even see this in young children. Give a pack of preschoolers a mountain of toys, more than they could possibly use, and they will immediately begin hoarding and fighting over them. Give that exact same group of preschoolers three empty cardboard boxes and a wooden spoon, and they will use them as props in a cooperative game.

> It seems fairly clear to me that having more stuff makes people more greedy. And, yes, there is causation there, not just correlation.

My hypothesis for this is that wealth isn't free; the more you have, the more expensive maintaining it is, the more rapidly it'll evaporate if you fail to maintain it, and the worse it'll hurt. In case of Amazon, it's probably less that they're bored and are coveting more money for no reason - it's more likely that they face the usual pressures for growth and continue to seek opportunities to squeeze more money out of people.

> You can even see this in young children. Give a pack of preschoolers a mountain of toys, more than they could possibly use, and they will immediately begin hoarding and fighting over them. Give that exact same group of preschoolers three empty cardboard boxes and a wooden spoon, and they will use them as props in a cooperative game.

I question that. I have two small children, and whether they're dealing with a mountain of toys, or three pans and a wooden spoon, they'll switch between fighting over a single thing and playing cooperatively every couple minutes. They're very quick to get into a fight, and even quicker to make up again.

1. Jeff Bezos no longer controls Amazon operations. 2. He doesn't own the company either, he owns a minority stake. 3. In what universe does Amazon come even remotely close to having a "quasi-monopoly" over the internet? This isn't true when limiting it to just e-commerce. 4. The majority of people actually prefer to watch ads over increasing prices. Streaming platforms ad-supported plans are MASSIVELY successful.

1. He's the chair of the board, so he has an outsized amount of control. He could easily fire the CEO or any other C-Suite members if he wanted to.

2. He owns a bit more than a minority stake, he owns (I've found several estimates, so I'm putting in a range here) between 9% and 12.5%. That's hardly a minority stake for a company worth nearly $1.5 trillion. He's the single largest shareholder.

3. Maybe not a full on monopoly, but AWS has the same market share in the cloud space as the next two providers combined. (MSFT + Google). That's as close to a monopoly as I can think in of a competitive industry without getting trust busted.

4. Most people I know would prefer to keep things the way they are - they pay for a premium service on top of already paying for Prime. If Amazon offered Prime Video for free but it was ad-supported, I'd be fine with that. I don't think I'm alone when I say that if I'm paying for a premium service (Video) on top of already paying for a service (Prime), Amazon shouldn't be allowed to triple-dip by selling ads.

Streaming platforms usually have ad-supported tiers, yes, but most of those are either free or very cheap.

1. I'm not saying he doesn't still have control over governance at Amazon. As executive chair he most certainly does. Operational decision like these are not subject to the board of directors though. He also couldn't "easily" unilaterally fire Jassy. With all the clout he likely still has if he told the board they should vote to fire Jassy over the decision to run ads on PV they would tell him to get bent.

2. You're literally describing a minority stake here.

3. Last data point I saw was around 3% of internet traffic running through AWS. Also I'd say there's quite a large difference between the internet as an entity and the cloud infra a tiny part of it is run on.

4. Most people I know would prefer to get Prime for free but that's never gonna happen either. I'd wager that at this point the only cash flow positive streaming platform out there is Netflix which is simply not sustainable. So it's either cancel the product eventually, raise prices, or introduce ads. The vast majority of people would opt to go with the ads.

> quasi-monopoly

AKA, not a monopoly.

Monopoly is such a funny buzzword to me because it's both wildly misused and completely misunderstood to be an inherently bad thing.

In reality, there is rarely a true monopoly and the only bad thing about them is that they enable anti-competitive behavior and that's the thing that's illegal and bad.

Amazon "quasi-monopoly" comes from having the best service. Great service is good for consumers.

Agreed. Products/companies can be anticompetitive even if they are not a monopoly. Products can also contain their own submarket in which they achieved a monopoly through anticompetitive practices. For example ios on Iphones. That last bit is somewhat controversial but is the opinion of the current justice department of the executive branch of the government and seems to be the correct reading of the Kodak case[0]. In any event I don't think Prime video is anticompetitive except in as much as it can take losses for years to price others out of the market but that doesn't seem to be happening.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak_Co._v._Image_Tec....

No true Scotsman argument aside, anti-competitive practices by very powerful firms are a bad thing, even if the firm got the market power because they have or had the best product.

> No true Scotsman argument

I was wary of the phrasing when I was writing it because of that but I don't think it's a "no true scotsman" argument because there is a real legal definition of monopoly that they clearly don't even come close to satisfying. I probably should have replaced the word "true" with "real" or "legal".

The FTC disagrees with you: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/...

If Jeff Bezos said "I've got enough", perhaps Prime Video wouldn't exist, which would be a net loss to their employees and their consumers who pay for that. It would also mean that Netflix and Disney would very likely be charging more, due to less competition.

Now, if you meant he should just be running this kind of stuff pro bono, consider that Prime Video cost about $16 billion USD per year just for content last year. Even if he puts all his wealth into it, Prime Video would last less than 10 years as a free service before it had to shut down.

I think we should tax the hell out of billionaires by the way, but that's an unrelated issue.

Amazon is a publicly traded company. Shareholders want to increase their stock value by increasing profits. Blaming only Bezos for greediness is not fair. He may be greedy but so are all the shareholders.

If he'd stopped when he had enough, I wouldn't be able to order stuff at 23:00 and have it delivered at 07:00.

If Musk had stopped when he had enough, I won't be able to take weekend vacations to orbital hotels in my lifetime.

Enough money to live comfortably is just one goal; building cool things is another orthogonal one.

When those “cool things” are made through exploitation (and they are), being ok with it makes you a deplorable shithead.

These are not things worth the human costs associated.

Who is being exploited and how?

The workers who are worked to the bone, while the profit goes to the shareholders. Don’t pretend to not know how terrible Amazon treats its labor.

There are more employers in most towns than just Amazon; everyone who works there thinks it's a better option for them than the other jobs available to them.

The workers are also free to become shareholders; Amazon is of course publicly traded.

When you’re done licking Bezo’s boots, go talk to those people you think are “free to become shareholders” (when they live paycheck to paycheck) or free to work elsewhere (when amazon or walmart have shut down the shops that used to be on Main St.).

Capitalism demands that all products and services are maximally enshittified for profit to the breaking point line, and no further.

He didn't get rich from being charitable! He got rich from being greedy and IMO stingy.

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