LawTalkers - Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

70% market share is a monopoly in my book;
I do not believe that Amazon has anything close to 70% of stuff shipped in packages, which is to say that your house must be atypical;* and
Most of what Amazon can ship to you can also be bought in a store.

* Half of the cars in our driveway are VWs, but that doesn't mean that VW has 50% of the auto market.

That’s an unduly narrow definition that ignores Amazon’s anticompetitive practices. Amazon is not just a package delivery company. If your product can be sold on AMZN, you must deal with the company. And it will fuck you over in favor of its own version of the product, or one offered by a manufacturer or vendor in which it has an interest or with which it enjoys more profitable terms.

sebastian_dangerfield

07-15-2022 01:46 PM

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Replaced_Texan (Post 533304)

I mean, I think AWS holds a pretty big share of the cloud service market, but I don't know if it comes close to even 40%, and I don't think it's that hard to enter that particular market.

You have to think more about its anticompetitive behaviors across a number of industries to understand how it is a monopoly. Bezos is a genius. The company employs its power across so many industries that its ability to kill competition can always be defended with, “Yeah, but we don’t control X % of any specific market except a few like books, about which no one cares.”

One of the articles I cited notes AMZN is also a monopsony in some markets. I think that’s true. In that regard, I think it’s uniquely anticompetitive. WalMart is in the same basket. Ask any wholesaler or manufacturer who’s been to Bentonville to negotiate fair prices with those assholes.

Adder

07-15-2022 04:57 PM

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski (Post 533319)

It has been mentioned I am willing to file frivolous IP lawsuits, so, go ahead, MAKE MY DAY!

For what it's worth, I believe "objectively baseless" is the standard I was trying to remember.

Adder

07-15-2022 04:58 PM

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

Quote:

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 533321)

This is called "competition." Lots of people have tried to find a way to call it something else, but none convincingly.

Tyrone Slothrop

07-15-2022 07:20 PM

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

Quote:

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 533320)

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/econom...th-not-qualify

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.naiba.com/...a_Monopoly.pdf

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/ama...er-11602084168

Oh, FFS.

First of all, read Ben Evans on Amazon's market share. He is smart and writes well.

From your first link:

Quote:

Would Amazon qualify as a monopoly?
Despite its explosive growth, Amazon falls short of meeting the US Department of Justice‘s monopoly threshold, defined as a market share of greater than 50 percent. By next year, Amazon says it will have around four percent of all retail sales in the US, and just one percent of the $25bn global market. So its share of the e-commerce market in the US is 37.7 percent, according to eMarketer. But online represents only 10 percent of the entire US retail market – with 90 percent still brick-and-mortar stores.

The article then quotes Barry Lynn as saying that Amazon is a monopoly in books and some electronics. I suspect Amazon has a monopoly in e-books. For physical books, do they? If they do, are they abusing that monopoly? What do you think, Sebby?

The second link is a bunch of talking points from the American Booksellers Association, and if I was going to cocktail hour, I would probably rather spend time with those guys than with Amazon. Note first that when they talk about market share, they talk about "online" sales. But you can buy those same books offline. Not sure that online is a market, or that anything is stopping booksellers from selling their books online in competition with Amazon, except that Amazon is very good at it. I get the same book, cheaper and faster, from Amazon. You know who that is good for? Me. What's the harm here to Amazon's monopoly? Do you think people are writing fewer books because the publishers are making less money and paying authors less? And that's Amazon's fault?

If Amazon is driving down prices because it's using its size to drive good deals with publishers, isn't that good for consumers and the economy? Is there any reason why others can't do the same thing there?

I'd like to read the third link but I'm not a WSJ subscriber. Quote, please.

Tyrone Slothrop

07-15-2022 07:23 PM

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

Quote:

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 533321)

Some day, you and I will have a drink or two and I will get to tell you more about this. I will explain to you that lawyers as smart as me have spent much time and money to try to turn what you are talking about into antitrust claims, without avail. Just calling these practices "anticompetitive" does not magically turn them into antitrust violations (or Amazon into a monopoly, for that matter).

What you are talking about is, potentially, a problem for businesses selling on Amazon. Amazon's competitors have tried and failed to persuade businesses that these are reasons not to do business with Amazon. Businesses that sell on Amazon have many, many other ways to sell in e-commerce. eBay, Rakuten, Etsy, Shopify, etc., etc. No one is forced to sell on Amazon.

Tyrone Slothrop

07-15-2022 07:25 PM

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

Quote:

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 533322)

YThe company employs its power across so many industries that its ability to kill competition can always be defended with, “Yeah, but we don’t control X % of any specific market except a few like books, about which no one cares.”

Pray tell, which competitors has Amazon killed?

Quote:

One of the articles I cited notes AMZN is also a monopsony in some markets. I think that’s true. In that regard, I think it’s uniquely anticompetitive. WalMart is in the same basket. Ask any wholesaler or manufacturer who’s been to Bentonville to negotiate fair prices with those assholes.

In your vision of antitrust, the government decides what is a "fair" price?

Hank Chinaski

07-15-2022 08:33 PM

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop (Post 533326)

Some day, you and I will have a drink or two and I will get to tell you more about this.

confidential to sebby: if Ty picks the restaurant the food will be good, but it will likely smell badly.

Icky Thump

07-16-2022 07:29 AM

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski (Post 533328)

confidential to sebby: if Ty picks the restaurant the food will be good, but it will likely smell badly.

If it is dead how can it smell at all?

sebastian_dangerfield

07-18-2022 01:19 PM

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adder (Post 533324)

This is called "competition." Lots of people have tried to find a way to call it something else, but none convincingly.

Perhaps in some instances that defense holds. But if I am selling Widget X on AMZN platform, without use of which I cannot really enter the online marketplace, and AMZN intentionally:

1. Sells the same thing at a loss on its platform, to undercut my ability to sell; and/or,
2. Seeks to divert customers from me to another seller with which AMZN has a better deal (or of which AMZN is a part owner),

Is that really competition, or is that anti-competitive use of monopoly power over the online marketplace (which it owns)?

sebastian_dangerfield

07-18-2022 01:32 PM

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

Quote:

Pray tell, which competitors has Amazon killed?

The list of businesses it has killed by engaging in the practices I noted above in response to Adder would go on forever.

Quote:

In your vision of antitrust, the government decides what is a "fair" price?

No. But the govt can intervene where WalMart is throwing around its immense weight to force suppliers to sell to it at prices that will put them out of business, thereby creating a market in which only a handful of manufacturers and wholesalers who grow large enough to be able to sell to them in volume at such low prices, or have somehow diversified their pools of buyers enough to offset the thin margins provided by WalMart with reasonable profits from other purchasers, can survive.

WalMart's lovely folks in Bentonville offer, after making people wait for hours in its shitty corporate office, the following:

This is what we'll pay, and you can take it or leave it. And if you leave it, good luck finding someone else who'll buy as much from you as we do.

Again, that is technically, in the weakest sense, defensible as competition. (A situation in which "competition" ceases to have any real meaning.) But it's a competition in which WalMart is admitting it is a monopsony. And it uses its profits, accrued in large part from its purchasing power, to put competition out of business, which, wait for it... increases its monopsony. And so it goes...

Maybe that's not a black and white classic antitrust issue, but it's definitely anti-competitive in the fairest plain reading of that term.

Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

07-18-2022 03:00 PM

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski (Post 533328)

confidential to sebby: if Ty picks the restaurant the food will be good, but it will likely smell badly.

Still, even while eating, they won't worry about the monopolies that manufacture that food....

Tyrone Slothrop

07-18-2022 03:52 PM

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

Quote:

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield (Post 533330)

You assume your conclusion when you say "without use of which I cannot really enter the online marketplace". That's just completely wrong. Amazon is one of many channels. It's a good channel, but there are many others online.

If (*if*) Amazon had monopoly power in platform services necessary to sell in e-commerce, and if e-commerce were not constrained by offline commerce (as is clearly the case in some product markets, and is clearly not the case in others), then there would be a good argument that Amazon would be abusing its platform-services monopoly to advantage itself in other markets in which that's a key input. You can imagine that a rival of Amazon (let's call it "Etsybay") might vigorously argue this, to persuade you to use them instead of Amazon. You can imagine that other countries (say, in Europe) with less permissive monopoly-abuse law might be more sympathetic to these arguments than US courts, and that Etsybay might pitch your argument to those regulators too. If you were to be talking to someone at Etsybay who has been involved with this, what do you think they'd say if they could talk truthfully and anonymously?

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