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Comment by akavi | Hacker News Reader

Reminder that a mere 15 years ago, Walmart was the unfair monopolist whose market position rendered competition infeasible.

Also unclear to me why "ecommerce" is a market unto itself that we should be concerned with level of concentration in, as opposed to simply a slice of the broader "retail" market (which is much less concentrated)

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Amazon's "favoured nation" policy stipulates that vendors can't sell an item anywhere else for a lower price. This policy seems designed by them to put a moat between them and retail.

How is this legal? I remember in college my university had a contract with Coke that forbade them from selling Pepsi products.

It just feels icky to me that you can sign away your rights to do business with someone else.

Yes, but we don't know when the next technology shift will happen. Amazon might be able to abuse their position for decades if a disruption doesn't come.

Aa for E-commerce, it can have a larger inventory than physical retail. You're not going to find many solar charge controllers or mechanical keyboard parts at Walmart, but Amazon will have tons of options deliverable within 48 hours. Few sites can have comparable shipping cost/speed and you have to research each one, whereas Amazon enjoys the position of being the default.

A decade ago, I helped a small Amazon seller with his inventory, and it was eye opening to see all the fees and risks compared to eBay. But he couldn't sell on eBay without losing a massive portion of his customer base, despite their better shopping/buying UX in my experience.

The original complaint has a number of pages starting at 39 (43 in pdf) dedicated to defining the relevant markets and why they feel brick and mortar isn't part of the relevant market.

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/1910134amazonec...

This is why pinning anti-trust to monopolies is a mistake. Anti-trust is about competition and creating more of it... and if it's about increasing competition then they both need attention. They are both very big and abuse their dominance in ways that stifles competition. That is, in the last 15 years we added another company that needs anti-trust attention, nothing was replaced.

The criticisms of Walmart 15 years ago are still pretty valid today, so I’m not sure this whataboutism really resonates with people.

It seems completely reasonable to split brick and mortar sales from web-based, given that the business model is pretty significantly different.

And AWS

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