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Comment by lvl102 | Hacker News Reader

Out of all the natural tech monopolies, Amazon is the ONLY one that did the opposite of exercising market power. They actually brought fast shipping to the market. A decade ago, you had to pay a crap ton of money to ship things even two days. They forced the incumbents such as Walmart to change. They’re constantly improving e-commerce. Heck they even opened up aws and created an entire industry. Amazon did more to reshape commerce in the US than anyone in the past two decades.

What more does US govt want?

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Less market concentration. Lina Khan, the current head of the FTC, argued before she got the job that market concentration and not consumer harm was a better target for antitrust enforcement.

Amazon does exercise a fair amount of their market power. FBA policies are generous to the consumer and to amazon, taking it out of the third party sellers. The other classic example was IIRC diapers.com which was a sharp competitor until Amazon bought it and raised diaper prices. It's possible this was all a ZIRP fad, and diapers.com was burning through investor cash, but still a pretty clear-cut case of consolidating market power (at the time the FTC did not consider it illegal).

>market concentration and not consumer harm was a better target for antitrust enforcement.

By what reasoning? If it’s not harming consumers then what is the issue being raised

Antitrust law in the US was traditionally to protect consumers. I'm not seeing consumer harm on net from Amazon.

They did all those things unsustainably so they could gain market share and raise prices when people were locked in. Similar to Uber and AirBnB etc. All those things are good but not feasible and subsidized by the capital/venture markets. The game is market share and ecosystem lock-in both from suppliers and customers.

A truly competitive marketplace allows any supplier to easily match with any customer. Suppliers gain market share by being the ‘best’, not by being the only option.

How did they actually raise prices? They are still competing on prices on everything. They have the best return policy even besting Costco. FTC and Lina Khan can pound sand. They should go after Walmart for destroying American towns and small businesses before they go after Amazon. I cannot think of a single company that produced more utility for consumers than Amazon.

How is it priced unsustainably/subsidized by venture? Amazon is profitable.

They straight up copied products in their store an then listed theirs higher in search results. There was a famous instance of a bag. You can't be more monopolistic than that.

They also got insight into every states future plans (which are secret for some reason ) when they offered to build new HQs but then decided not too. This gives them a huge advantage over anyone else who wants to setup a nation wide logistics service.

> They straight up copied products in their store an then listed theirs higher in search results. There was a famous instance of a bag. You can't be more monopolistic than that.

Almost every major grocery store and convenience store chain does this. These are the store’s generic brands, they are specifically designed to be copies of the name brand, and they are positioned more favorably on the shelves. (They often say “compare to [name brand]”.) In general, this is highly beneficial to competition and the consumer.

If you want to make an argument that Amazon’s high market share makes this strategy damaging when it would otherwise be good, then sure go ahead and do that. But the argument needs to be specific and quantitative.

That's not what the word "monopoly" means though...

You don't have to have > 50% market share to be prosecuted for anti-trust practices.

Along with this, I don't understand how the part of the lawsuit that says "Conditioning sellers’ ability to obtain 'Prime' eligibility for their products—a virtual necessity for doing business on Amazon—on sellers using Amazon’s costly fulfillment service"

is solely an anti-competitive tactic, because how else would Amazon guarantee the fast shipping, etc. if they aren't in control of the fulfilment? I thought prime is only possible through amazon distributing third party products to their warehouses all over so that the shipping can be so fast.

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