Honestly, I'm kind of surprised that there are no laws in place in the U.S., even with them being hardcore capitalists, to prevent such a huge monopoly to choose what they don't want to sell on their marketplace simply because in the past few years they've decided to produce products that compete with Apple and Google.<p>Bezos' goal from 1997 was to be the 'everything store' as it's succinctly put in the biography about Amazon's rise, and they're doing a fine job of that. I have friends and family that purchase just about everything short of groceries on amazon. But what happens when they decide to enter more markets with their own products and cut off other competitors from selling who don't have the clout or leverage of a behemoth like Apple or Google? If Google had not pulled YouTube from their Fire devices it's unlikely they would have let them sell their products once again. Which shouldn't have even had to happen in the first place.<p>Also, I think this was only in the US because I was checking Amazon UK last week and you were still able to buy chromecasts and Google Home. This is probably because the EU has laws that restricts companies from taking advantage of their monopolised position and pushing competitors out.
Search for a Chromecast device on Amazon and you'll be greeted with pages and pages of Chinese Chromecast v1 and v2 lookalikes that have no Chromecast functionality. It's absolutely ridiculous that Amazon supports and profits from these types of third party sellers.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=chromecast" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3...</a>
If they did this to Apple and Google, what prevents them from doing it to smaller companies that make similar products? How is this not anticompetitive?
So, will Google in return allow Amazon (and maybe also others) to stream to Chromecasts from Android devices without Google Play Services?<p>Will they maybe even open up the API?<p>I doubt it.<p>Chromecast still has only a single server implementation, which is proprietary, and either a single proprietary client implementation, or potentially two proprietary ones (in case Amazon has reverse engineered Google's Chromecast client for the Chromecast support in the Prime Music app, I haven't verified that yet)
You can't say that Amazon dominates retail to the extent that Youtube dominates internet video, but there have been a few occasions where Google has kept it's dominant Youtube video off of platforms that Google competes against.<p>Windows Phone, Echo Show, and Fire TV come to mind.<p>Is Youtube's share of the online video market large enough that this pattern of behavior would trigger antitrust concerns in the US?<p>How about under the EU's competition law, which kicks in at a much lower threshold? Would Amazon and Youtube both have a large enough market share to get them into legal hot water for anti-competitive behavior in the EU?