The FTC Sues to Break Up Amazon Over an Economy-Wide "Hidden Tax"
The FTC Sues to Break Up Amazon Over an Economy-Wide "Hidden Tax"
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The FTC Sues to Break Up Amazon Over an Economy-Wide "Hidden Tax"
7 comments
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Good luck!
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🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states filed an antitrust suit against Amazon, one of the biggest companies in the world, for monopolization and unfair methods of competition.
Ostensibly, the retail firm is the lowest price option in the market, and it offers “free shipping” to over 100 million Amazon Prime customers, for which it charges a $139 a year membership fee.
Consumers pay for the free shipping, it’s just a hidden tax baked into the price of what you buy by an extraordinarily clever scheme put forward by Amazon.
The firm even speculated that “media and selling partners may claim the removal of the clause was not only trivial but a trick and an attempt to garner goodwill with policymakers amid increasing competition concerns.”
Indeed, the stakes here are one reason that antitrust legend Bill Kovacic called the Amazon complaint “the most important case that the FTC has brought in its 109-year history.”
The second is something called Project Nessie, which is an algorithmic pricing system so egregious that the FTC determined that it deserved its own charge as an unfair method of competition.
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I wonder what effects this will have with all these antitrust suits happening right as AI is ramping up, but before any of them have got any real foothold. Maybe Alexa will never get a brain and instead AI assistants will be seeded by the breakups or startups untarnished by the end stages of their shareholders parasitizing value?
7 comments
That's a really interesting article on how Amazon makes it money when prime is such a good deal for the consumers. I really hope Amazon gets broken up
Especially because they don't actually make that much money from their online store as opposed to Amazon Web Services. That's the behemoth that keeps them chugging along. It should be a separate company.
Well funnily enough I think that part, legally, is totally fine. There's nothing anti competitive about being in two unrelated industries, and I don't think there's a good case that aws is a monopoly. There are viable and cheaper alternatives like hetzner, aws is just popular but it's not manipulating the market