Bullying Is Not Innovation | Hacker News Reader

Bullying Is Not Innovation

perplexity.ai

32 pointsjuokaz21 comments

American companies do this a lot. Rule for thee, not for me. For example lawyers. Companies have a team of lawyers to ensure you only play by their terms, on terms they can only understand, with disproportionate amortized advantages/disadvantages (who can afford to add $1000 to their disney+ subscription? Disney spreads the cost lawyers across millions of transactions...). Or they retain their right to sue you, but force you into arbitration.

Not that I suspect perplexity is any kind of innocent of that behavior (or at least will remain so if extremely successful)

Now companies are doing the same with AI. We can use AI, and other tools to maximize what we extract from you, but you cannot use AI to help yourself with better outcomes.

I also commented here that it sounds anti-competitive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816871

The reason Amazon doesn’t want AI involved is because then AI could skip Amazon altogether in the future and checkout directly on seller’s websites.

It’s actually the idea behind the decentralized marketplace I’m building. It uses MCP-UI to bring the whole storefront and checkout into the chat.

I’m keeping a close eye on e-commerce and AI and the recent deal Paypal made with OpenAI and Amazon getting aggressive, it’s clear they want to make AI powered commerce a walled garden.

Interesting. Your solution literally feel like switching from one garden to another one. This time, with "AI".

Yes the marketplace supports our e-commerce platform, Openfront, for now but is built with adapters so any platform can be connected.

We felt AI was the perfect glue between different types of stores and could navigate them using intelligence. An example of this is being able to paste in your address in chat and AI will figure out which is the country, state, etc. Different stores handle addresses differently.

Ok. How can this help businesses wanting to take "control" of their brand and customers? Won't this be equivalent to being an Amazon Seller?

The difference is stores own everything. When someone buys, payment goes straight to the store's account. Customer data goes to their system. The marketplace just queries their existing API and renders it conversationally. Orders show up directly in the store's platform. They don't have to log into anything new or manage multiple dashboards. We never touch the money or data.

This system would function similarly to platforms like WooCommerce or Shopify, but with the key differentiator of being integrated directly into your search engine/chat interface, instead of Google, Amazon, or ChatGPT, right? What is your monetization strategy? Ads? monthly fee to show up on the engine?

Also, you're adding a discovery platform where businesses have to compete against other businesses for visibility and customers. Why would I choose to, yet again, help create another "aggregator" to the already saturated "aggregator" market (Amazon, Shopify, Google, ChatGPT, etc.)?

Btw, I'm not trying to bash your idea. The reason I ask is that businesses (even smaller ones) don't pay just for software, but for everything else (support, etc), and among those things, software too, and frankly, the main problem 15 years ago was discovery, but with social media (Twitter, ig, and now TikTok), discovery itself is a solved problem.

We sell the software. Openfront is open source e-commerce platforms for every vertical (retail, restaurants, salons, hotels). Businesses get the full source code, self-host or host with us. That's our business.

This marketplace doesn't charge transaction fees because stores already have their own infrastructure. We're just connecting to it. Marketplace operators who fork this can charge flat listing fees or affiliates, but the model works because discovery is separate from infrastructure.

On discovery being solved: social sends traffic to your site, but checkout still happens on your platform. Same here. The difference is stores aren't locked in. They expose a standard interface once and automatically work with every marketplace using that protocol. One store can be listed on multiple marketplaces serving different audiences without any extra integrations.

You're right that businesses pay for more than software. But they also shouldn't have to pay 15-30% transaction fees when they already own the checkout stack. That's the shift.

I'm very concerned about the idea of about giving LLMs access to my credit card, but this is the kind of future I want. I prefer to buy products directly from manufacturers, but I keep going back to Amazon. Amazon's experience is pretty bad in many ways, but I still get value out of the fast ("free") Prime shipping, and Amazon's ability to aggregate products across different categories and manufacturers is still a strength.

I would love to be able to just type "buy me a FooCorp BarBaz" into an LLM, and have it take care of choosing the retailer based on whatever criteria I've decided, whether that's lowest price, best return policy, fastest shipping... whatever. That sounds like it could be a much better experience than what we have now.

But I do worry that a service like yours could be biased in myriad ways, and an unscrupulous owner of such a service could do shady things like allowing retailers to pay to be preferred over others. Ultimately I'd want the open source version of this that I can self-host.

This is why the code is completely open-source, to keep us honest. All we use is a config file to keep track of stores. You can also bring your own key if you think our LLM is bias or going to give preference to certain stores. Check out our Ethos [0], it covers things in great detail.

0. https://marketplace.openship.org/ethos

> The reason Amazon doesn’t want AI involved is because then AI could skip Amazon altogether in the future and checkout directly on seller’s websites.

That would be nice indeed. Let’s decouple ratings, reviews etc from the place we purchase the product from. Those can never be in the same place.

No word on if their agent actually does the right thing or if it's causing higher than normal return rates

I don’t see how Amazon or anyone else can prevent AI agents from acting on someone’s behalf. Can they prevent me from using the keyboard or mouse I like? What about the browser I like? What about screen readers? Isn’t trying to ban use of an AI tool a potential violation of disability law? What if I need help from one of these tools to perform actions on my behalf? Or for that matter, isn’t this an antitrust issue - with companies trying to control everything with unreasonable demands?

Note that the broken patent system is a part of the abuse enablement. Companies like Amazon rack up huge portfolios of mostly frivolous patents for this purpose. They may claim they only use them defensively. But the reality is if you cross them in any way, they can then “defensively” make your life miserable by abusing the law through the broken patent system. For example if a company like Amazon copies your innovative product, you can’t practically go after them, because they hold all sorts of leverage through the patent system.

This is not about patent or copyright. Amazon has sent them a C&D, and can legally choose to terminate Perplexity's access to their services if they desire, the same way they can block scrapers.

Now, maybe that is monopoly abuse. But monopoly abuse isn't taken seriously in America, so Perplexity's options are limited.

If you were using their site in a way they felt violated their ToS or affected their business, they absolutely can and would ban you in much the same way from using it. You're conflating entirely separate things.

Agentic browsers raise a lot of questions that were hanging there even before LLMs.

Can I ask my partner to buy a product on Amazon? Can I ask my personal assistant to buy a product on Amazon? Can I hire a contractor to buy products on Amazon? Can I communicate with a contractor via API to direct them what products to buy? What if there is no human on the other end and its an LLM?

Same issue with LinkedIn. I know execs who have assistants running their socials. Is this legal?

Perplexity should use this argument.

You've been spamming this in a few threads.

A private business can 100% refuse service to you. Examples with regards to "delegation":

- If you come in using a form of non-cash payment that doesn't belong to you.

- If you're purchasing a car, and are filling out paperwork under someone else's name. FYI, you can buy cars on Amazon.com.

- If you attempt to pick-up a pre-order or an item earmarked for someone else.

...

Of course some businesses are more or less restrictive base on fraud chance, yada yada, but you get the idea. You're not being oppressed. Go shop elsewhere.

I don't think any of your examples are analogous to the questions/point the GP was trying to make. Your questions seem to be centered around someone trying to trick or defraud a retailer; GP's is about simple, straightforward delegation.

But yes, agreed, businesses have the right to refuse service to anyone (outside of illegal discrimination).

We should fight it, though, when those refusals are backed by anti-consumer practices. It's pretty clear that Amazon doesn't like agent-mediated purchases because it allows the customer to bypass Amazon's ability to put sponsored products in front of you, and try to get you to buy related and add-on products along with what you actually want.

Sure, it is their right to do that, but as consumers I think we shouldn't be complacent and just take what the big shopping overlords feed us. Consolidation (and races to the bottom such as this) is making it harder and harder to find competing retailers and products when we want to vote with our wallets as to what kinds of shopping experiences are acceptable.

And the bottom line is that if Amazon realizes that they're losing sales because people want to use AI agents to buy things, and they're banning those agents, they'll change their tune. But that only works so long as there are alternatives with better practices, and, well... there aren't many.

Apologies, I didn't mean to spam, haven't seen the other thread that picked up more votes and was really curious about where the line is.

I completely understand private businesses having a right to refuse a service without a cause. But as others pointed, the question is to what degree "delegation" is acceptable if I'm acting in a good faith?

I'm guessing the answer is "to a degree it doesn't impact our business".

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