Comment by nwiswell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nwiswell | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I can't help but think that Amazon should be replaced with a non-profit or regulated public utility that provides a single unified online marketplace, part of internet infrastructure like ICANN. Sellers would select among competing fulfillment services (warehouse+shipping). Platform referral fees would go toward customer remediation, anti-counterfeiting, and review integrity.

I don't merely say this as a "fuck Amazon" reflex or a "fuck capitalism" reflex. I say it because it obviously would allow so much of the dying segment of mom and pop small business to become viable again. Just from a policy perspective it's a home run because it's a way to juice GDP, improve consumer purchasing power, AND reduce income inequality.

As a matter of fact I would suggest that Amazon as it exists is anti-capitalist. It is feudal. Capitalism is the deployment of capital and assumption of risk in pursuit of new value creating activity. Amazon is not marshalling new capital to innovate or improve its digital marketplace. Rather, Amazon simply owns digital real estate and extracts rent, like some kind of futuristic dystopian corpo-baron.

The best part of all this is that Amazon doesn't have to be forcibly nationalized or broken up or anything like that. The government just needs to support and endorse a good alternative, because Amazon seriously sucks.

Don't you think if we turned USPS into this it would be a another billions of dollars a year waste for taxpayers? Do we really need to be subsidizing drop shippers?

> Amazon is not marshalling new capital to innovate or improve its digital marketplace. Rather, Amazon simply owns digital real estate and extracts rent, like some kind of futuristic dystopian corpo-baron.

What on earth are you on about? They own a url.

Amazon owns one of the most sophisticated logistics networks in the world. They own warehouses and robots and trucks and planes. All of that adds up to a meaningful, valuable contribution to the world.

I buy tons of stuff on Amazon. I buy from them rather than from eBay or an independent online retailer because I know it'll actually get delivered to my house on time. For me, the marketplace is basically irrelevant - it's the promise of fulfilment by Amazon that I care about.

I sometimes reluctantly buy from an eBay seller or a random e-commerce site when the item I want isn't available on Amazon. Those retailers tend to offer "FREE DELIVERY", but they also tend to be very evasive about how long it'll take and which company will do the delivering. Sometimes they'll advertise next-day delivery, but take two or three days to actually dispatch the package. Sometimes they'll use an ultra-cheap delivery service that takes 3-5 days, with no prior warning of which day they'll actually try to deliver on. Sometimes their terrible delivery service will decide that they just can't be bothered to deliver to my house, so they'll lie about having tried to deliver it and tell me to collect it from a warehouse. Sometimes they deliver to somewhere random in the vague vicinity of my house (a neighbour, underneath a parked car, behind a bush) and I get to play a fun scavenger hunt where the prize is something I already paid for. These bad outcomes literally never happen to me when I buy from Amazon.

In the event that something did go wrong with a delivery, I'm confident that I could just contact Amazon and they'd make it right; when something goes wrong with $OnlineRetailer, I often find myself refereeing a dispute between the retailer and the logistics company, both of whom deny responsibility.

There are plenty of alternatives to Amazon, but from a customer's perspective they just suck.

All of what you're saying has to do with Amazon fulfillment (FBA), not Amazon.com the Internet marketplace.

They're two entirely different things (you can actually use Amazon fulfillment for items sold on other websites, although it's typically too expensive). If Amazon fulfillment continues to dominate on an independent platform, that's great, they earned it, but at least they won't have absolute pricing power because sellers will have alternatives, and at least other companies will have a chance to impress you, too.

I'd figure that the marketplace would show the fulfillment company in addition to the way that the courier is typically indicated, so that customers could express their preferences. If the item does a lot of volume, perhaps a seller would even have inventory with multiple fulfillment companies, and buyers could pay a surcharge to get their preferred fulfillment, same as shipping.

> Don't you think if we turned USPS into this it would be a another billions of dollars a year waste for taxpayers? Do we really need to be subsidizing drop shippers?

You've missed the idea entirely. No shipping services are envisioned whatsoever by the "public utility". It would just be the actual marketplace connecting buyers, sellers, and fulfillment.

Amazon can continue to do order fulfillment if they like, it's just that any company with a warehouse can actually begin to compete with them. Sellers would be able to freely associate with whatever fulfillment company best suits their needs, rather than being captive to FBA.

> What on earth are you on about? They own a url.

Right, from which they extract enormous rents. It is not a product in which they continually invest. If you have used it with any frequency over the past decade, you've almost certainly noticed how shitty it's become. That's not an accident; their "sellers" (tenants) are locked in, and are paying something more like obligate rent rather than indicating with their dollars that Amazon's product is the best.

It would be the same story with privately owned power lines or privately owned roads. You're not using them because they're the best, but because you don't have a choice. We screwed up with the actual internet cables, but we still have time to get it right with internet marketplaces.

> I can't help but think that Amazon should be replaced with a non-profit or regulated public utility that provides a single unified online marketplace, part of internet infrastructure like ICANN.

if the market was working correctly Amazon's profits would be driven down to zero and you'd effectively have this

> As a matter of fact I would suggest that Amazon as it exists is anti-capitalist. It is feudal.

absolutely

What's the recourse if the market isn't working correctly?

Currently, the FTC suing them. Eventually, some sort of breakup and strict rules about counterfeits and house brands.

> if the market was working correctly Amazon's profits would be driven down to zero and you'd effectively have this

Are you sure? Consumer behavior seems to be to simply go to their default marketplace rather than to search the whole internet (which is slow, painful, and low-trust), so it ends up being a winner-take-all system where alternative marketplaces like eBay are almost irrelevant and Amazon charges whatever they like and basically ignores counterfeiting and review fraud.

There are "natural monopolies", like with roads and power distribution networks, and I would argue that online marketplaces have turned out to be another one, and we should modify our public policy to reflect that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com