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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
I had a response to your last post, but it became so Byzantine I gave up halfway through it. My only general point would be we need to emphasize the avoidance of anti-competitive acts over the strict definition of monopoly.
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You can emphasize whatever you want, but monopoly is about who a player *is* -- do they have, say, >50% share in a relevant market -- and anti-competitive acts are about what a player *does* -- are they, for example, fixing prices.
You keep throwing out those terms as if you haven't really thought about what they mean, which is a dangerous thing to do when you are sparring with someone like Adder who has practiced antitrust law for so long that his child calls him Herbert Hovenkamp for yuks.
I'm still waiting to hear from you where you think Amazon is a monopolist, other than, perhaps, in book sales. Perhaps. If you want to talk about markets in books, I'm here for that, but that doesn't seem to be where you are going.
Since you don't seem to be able to stick with the idea that Amazon is a monopolist, you've turned to tossing out the term "anti-competitive acts." The one thing you've particularly mentioned is that Amazon takes information about what third-parties are selling on its platform and uses it to also sell on its platform. Why is that anticompetitive? Do you really think sellers don't know about it? eBay, in particular, has been trying to persuade sellers to use it over Amazon for that reason for something like a decade. Doesn't that suggest there is robust platform competition? How do you think platforms compete with other platforms.
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I also think WalMart and Amazon are unique markets unto themselves that exert monopsony power in different sectors. But yes, that does cut against the idea of a monopsony.
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In tech antitrust, defining the relevant market is often the whole game. I think you are using "monopsony" as a synonym for "big", and objecting to anyone with enough scale that they can set terms to suppliers. Unless they are the only show in town, it's not a problem for consumers -- they get cheap prices from the big guys and buy other stuff elsewhere. I'm sure you do that all the time.
