FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

FBA seller here.<p>A lot of mom and pop businesses (~$20 million) have been built on Amazon over the past 10 years. Most of us are in the $250k to $5 million dollar range.<p>The impact of Amazon’s monopoly power is felt big time by us as we’re being squeezed with no place left to go online especially post-iOS change.<p>Our second option used to be the Facebook&#x2F;Instagram&#x2F;TikTok to Shopify connection but with that being dead in the water most of us have had to commit 100% to FBA to be able to stay afloat.<p>With the increase in inflation and Amazon abusing its power to significantly raise its prices for FBA and force us to use its advertising services our revenues have been severely impacted.<p>This doesn’t include their unwillingness to meaningfully fight counterfeits<p>Or that they penalize you if you attempt to drive sales elsewhere with lower pricing on other sites<p>Bloomberg did a write up on this a few months back:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2023-02-13&#x2F;amazon-amzn-takes-half-of-each-sale-from-2-million-small-businesses" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2023-02-13&#x2F;amazon-am...</a>

Does anyone know more about Project Nessie? There&#x27;s a portion of the complaint [0] that is <i>heavily</i> redacted from page 123 to 126. The only information that isn&#x27;t redacted is this:<p>* Project Nessie is an algorithmic pricing system<p>* &quot;Amazon&#x27;s Project Nessie has already extracted over [redacted] from American households.&quot;<p>* &quot;this scheme belies its public claim that it “seek[s] to be Earth’s most customer-centric company,”&quot;<p>* It&#x27;s related to Section VI.A.3 (Amazon maintains its monopolies by suppressing price competition with its first-party anti-discounting algorithm)<p>Amazon themselves identify Nessie as the system that monitors spikes or trends [1], so my hunch is this is some sort of surge pricing system. Does anyone here know more?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;ftc_gov&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1910129AmazoneCommerceComplaintPublic.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;ftc_gov&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1910129AmazoneC...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aboutamazon.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;amazon-offices&#x2F;the-surprising-stories-behind-the-peculiar-building-names-at-amazon" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aboutamazon.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;amazon-offices&#x2F;the-surprisi...</a>

FBA seller here, too. I make and sell my own patented device which nobody else makes or sells. I have competitors in the same category but my product is novel, more functional, and more expensive to make.<p>I was doing FBM (fulfillment by merchant) because I like shipping my product directly from my place of business but I had to switch to FBA to get my sales to go up. They were already getting half but now Amazon is getting more than half of my revenue.<p>I also have my own site where I can sell for the same price and keep much more of the revenue, but most shoppers won’t buy if they didn’t find it on Amazon. If I leave Amazon or raise my Amazon price to recoup the costs or stop paying for FBA and Amazon ads, I lose almost all of my sales. This is all because Amazon is doing anticompetitive things with its monopoly power. Enforcement is needed. I don’t know what the injunctions will propose to do but I’m eager to find out.<p>What really kills me is knowing how my customers would feel if I told them how much of their purchase price is being kept by Amazon. They value my product enough to buy it for that price. The few who really understand Amazon always offer to buy it directly from me so I get to keep more of the money. If only everyone understood that.<p>I have to spend some more time and money optimizing my Amazon listings and then I will turn my focus onto my site and spend all my effort building my business to survive in spite of Amazon.<p>Literally in spite.

remember that time that amazon was bleeding like 5 million a day just to make sure they can destroy diapers.com? by selling diapers at a loss, which was numbers that diapers.com couldn&#x27;t compete with given that they didn&#x27;t have another business to rely on, then forced diapers.com to sell to amazon because they had no other option?<p>And this came out last time they were doing monopolistic inquiries against amazon. Yet...<p>So I&#x27;d love to see something positive come out of it, but I have my doubts.

In my opinion, Amazon needs to be split into at least 4 independent entities:<p><pre><code> - Online marketplace - Consumer products - Internet infrastructure - Delivery logistics </code></pre> Similar to the three-tier distribution system for beer in most states (a brewer cannot be a wholesaler or a retailer). This makes it easier for smaller players can compete with the big ones on quality at least, if not price or recognition.<p>(Edit: format)

There are always so many blindly pro-business comments on stories like this, like when the Theranos stuff was happening, people were saying &quot;come on, she was just pitching big returns and innovations like any start-up does,&quot; ignoring the difference between pitching and straight-up lying or deliberately misleading investors about current facts. Similarly, it seems like many commenters are defending Amazon not based on the facts or legalities of the situation, but just from a place of being more emotionally sympathetic to a giant corporation trying to make a lot of money through various business tactics.<p>We don&#x27;t have a surplus of regulation in the US (contrary to what Republicans who want to get rid of the EPA, FDA, etc would say). When we actually have laws that say things like, you can&#x27;t union-bust, you can&#x27;t defraud investors, you can&#x27;t behave monopolistically--and there may be subtleties to those laws that most people don&#x27;t understand--and companies go so far as to violate those laws, it&#x27;s a very good thing when they face consequences.

I wish they would add ebook DRM to the list. Amazon has essentially locked the Kindle so that it can only purchase from Amazon and Amazon ebooks can only be used on the Kindle. On top of that, they offer no way of transferring ebooks and, AFAIK, offer no way to remove DRM after a work enters the public domain.

Without engaging the merits of this particular case, I do think there is an interesting takeaway about which companies wield even more power than Amazon (and Big Tech more generally, since Google and Meta are also discussed as likely targets of similar suits).<p>Notably: health insurers. They&#x27;re an oligopoly whose revenues total something like 4% of US GDP. They engage in anticompetitive practices, and the end result is far more consumer harm than Amazon can do. (Because people generally spend a lot more on health insurance premiums than they do on Amazon in a year.)<p>Similar could be written about e.g. airlines.<p>Lobbying works. Tech will eventually figure this out.

Even if this action turns out to be toothless, it should still go a long way to shape public perception. I cancelled Prime 3 years ago and really haven’t looked back. I simply shop elsewhere, and between Target and eBay I don’t miss a thing. The Echos got unplugged, the AWS certs didn’t get renewed, their music service got canceled. I am all out and I hope others will do the same. For me this was driven by their anticompetitive behavior as well as terrible treatment of staff from warehouse workers to web developers. This FTC suit brings a new level of attention and gravity to their insidious practices.<p>Obviously a firm that massive can’t be all bad. As a consumer, the only thing I have is choice in how I spend my time and resources based on the information I have.

Decouple Amazon Warehouse division from Amazon Web Services (AWS largely subsidizes losses incurred by warehouse division), then we will see change.<p>Right now FTC going after low hanging fruit. But we all know Amazon will challenge it in court, appeal, appeal, appeal, pay the reduced fine, slow roll any changes, and business will continue as usual.<p>Break up the tech giants and each individual unit cannot survive as-is.

&gt;The complaint alleges that Amazon violates the law not because it is big, but because it engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging<p>&gt;Anti-discounting measures that punish sellers and deter other online retailers from offering prices lower than Amazon, keeping prices higher for products across the internet. For example, if Amazon discovers that a seller is offering lower-priced goods elsewhere, Amazon can bury discounting sellers so far down in Amazon’s search results that they become effectively invisible.<p>I feel like ultimately they are accused of violations because they are big. I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the worst thing. But as others have pointed out - their tactics are very similar to deals grocery stores and retailers make with suppliers all the time. The only difference seems to be that Amazon is big enough that suppliers can&#x27;t legitimately threaten to take their business to another store - because there isn&#x27;t one.<p>Their complaints that Amazon makes prices higher for products across the internet is clearly only true because they are so big.

I signed up as a Seller on Amazon a while back, with one primary goal: sell extra copies of my book, published by Pantheon Books in 2017. The publisher offered me boxes of them at dirt-cheap prices and I took them up on their offer. So I started selling on Amazon, and I set my price as the lowest possible for &quot;New&quot; condition hardcover.<p>For a while my price got listed on the main book product page. Only briefly though. Then it disappeared, and another seller got the glory of the link for a &quot;New&quot; 3rd party seller, and their price was HIGHER than mine.<p>Amazon does not want to advertise your price if you are too low for their liking...<p>Suddenly, in July, my mom dies. I have to travel to the east coast for the funeral, etc., so I put a hold on the one and only item in my inventory -- my book. Effectively this takes me offline temporarily as an Amazon Seller which was fine.<p>BUT . . . when i get back home, I try to re-activate the account and find I cannot. INSTEAD, I get this notice from Amazon that my account is suspended, and that it&#x27;s mandatory I go watch all these training videos about COUNTERFEIT products, how to spot them, why not to sell them, why it&#x27;s illegal, etc, and that I do not have permission to sell counterfeit &quot;Pantheon products.&quot; And I&#x27;m like, WTF? I&#x27;m selling the real deal, from Pantheon, and I AM THE EFFING AUTHOR AND THESE ARE MY OWN BOOKS.<p>I try to communicate with Amazon Seller Program and get nowhere (I think they deliberately hire only people who don&#x27;t understand English). They refuse to explain anything about this absurd counterfeit stuff.<p>So I contact Pantheon. They just laugh. They had nothing to do with it, but weren&#x27;t surprised -- they kind of hate Amazon.<p>THEN I get a new notice from Amazon that my account is disabled permanently due to lack of use.<p>WTF!?<p>So: here is my theory. They were pissed I had a super-low price, and when they saw me temporarily disable my inventory as I&#x27;d be away for a week for a funeral, they swept in and shut me down, with some kind of made-up lie about COUNTERFEIT (I mean, can you believe these guys!?). And nothing is resolved, and we&#x27;re on the verge of October.<p>Amazon sucks.

Merits of this specific case aside, I find it really interesting that the FTC is going after Amazon now. They have pretty limited resources (especially relative to a massive tech co which can pour money into litigation) and have to pick and choose their battles carefully... I have to admit I&#x27;m a little frustrated that they&#x27;re choosing to go after Amazon, which yes, imo the case definitely has merits and they do shady stuff like with dark patterns for trying to cancel accounts and the like, but there are so many other things more important to my life that seem broken that I wish the FTC would prioritize. How about more of a focus on insurers who refuse claims, drug companies flouting the law, PE firms jacking up the cost of housing or contractors gouging the government (and therefore all of us)?

This seems extremely weak, even by recent FTC standards. Just in the past 2 years we&#x27;ve had the following e-commerce changes:<p>- Shopify small store explosion<p>- Google search adding products DIRECTLY to the search engine results<p>- LLM vs Search Engine battle. Whoever controls the LLM controls the product listing.<p>- Temu &amp; Shein exploding onto the scene. WSJ just had an article on this yesterday.<p>My real annoyance with the FTC is why they refuse to go after REAL monopolies that actually hurt consumers, such as Apple and their closed App Store.

Out of all the natural tech monopolies, Amazon is the ONLY one that did the opposite of exercising market power. They actually brought fast shipping to the market. A decade ago, you had to pay a crap ton of money to ship things even two days. They forced the incumbents such as Walmart to change. They’re constantly improving e-commerce. Heck they even opened up aws and created an entire industry. Amazon did more to reshape commerce in the US than anyone in the past two decades.<p>What more does US govt want?

It sounded like their audiobook division was acting in anti-competitive ways to push authors into single platform exclusivity. I wonder what else they&#x27;re up to.

This rings a little hollow to me because as a consumer, wouldn&#x27;t I have noticed a lack of non-amazon options?<p>My family buys on Amazon a lot but I am well aware that I can buy any of that stuff, including at times for a lower price, elsewhere - from company website to Costco to Walmart market, via Google shopping, etc.<p>Doesn&#x27;t the existence of these infinity choices make claims of monopoly a bit farfetched? I am sure it&#x27;s more complicated than this, but... is it?

&gt; <i>Conditioning sellers’ ability to obtain “Prime” eligibility for their products—a virtual necessity for doing business on Amazon—on sellers using Amazon’s costly fulfillment service</i><p>I&#x27;m no fan of Amazon, but that kind of makes sense - if they use another fulfillment service, Amazon wouldn&#x27;t be able to guarantee next-day delivery for their products?

People say Temu is garbage, but every time Im about to buy an 80 cent flashlight on Temu, or motorcycle googles, or 100 amp 12v circuit breaker for $6... I go to Amazon and find the EXACT same part for 300-800% more money with THOUSANDS of reviews.<p>Amazon still has decent things obviously. But if you&#x27;re going to buy junk, atleast buy it straight from the source for pennies on the dollar.

Yeah I’m kinda on the fence about this. On one hand, I see the case that this diminishes the open market. On the other hand, Amazon is doing this all within their own ecosystem. So it’s a bit disingenuous for the FTC to say that this has nothing to do with their size. The problem the FTC keeps skirting around on anticompetitive is the fact that the internet favors power differentials, so we’d have to ding any company that has massive market distribution and tweaks their platform to favor participants exclusively on their network<p>Network effects have not been accounted for in antitrust. That’s the core of the problem. Not the fact that Amazon is tweaking algos. Every major player is doing that.<p>I like Jerry Chen’s piece on “The New Moats” (ahead of its time published in 2017) that calls out the progression of tech going from systems of engagement -&gt; systems of record -&gt; systems of intelligence. It feels like this is one (of many) consequences of that progression:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.greylock.com&#x2F;the-new-moats-53f61aeac2d9" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.greylock.com&#x2F;the-new-moats-53f61aeac2d9</a>

I was an Amazon seller 10 years ago. I noticed that as soon as I started getting some traction, Amazon would start selling alternatives and undercut me. At some point they started asking for proof of sales. This was then further used to compete against me.<p>At some point, I had a complaint, refunded the customer completely, and they outright banned my account and held my money for 90 days (I got all of my money back after the 90 days). It completely wiped my business out and I never looked back.<p>I was banned to the point where if another seller was associated why my account at all, they were also banned. All of my calls went nowhere and I was pushed to automated responses.<p>12+ years later and I have my seller account back. Not like I&#x27;m ever going to sell anything on Amazon again.

&gt; “We’re bringing this case because Amazon’s illegal conduct has stifled competition across a huge swath of the online economy. Amazon is a monopolist that uses its power to hike prices on American shoppers and charge sky-high fees on hundreds of thousands of online sellers,” said John Newman, Deputy Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “Seldom in the history of U.S. antitrust law has one case had the potential to do so much good for so many people.”<p>Really, really hope this isn&#x27;t another woke crusade by Lina &quot;0-2&quot; Khan that promises to delivery a random victory to &quot;the common person&quot; and then ultimately fail to do anything meaningful.

27 Sept 2023 Interview with FTC Chair Lina Khan<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;26043.mc.tritondigital.com&#x2F;OMNY_SOUNDON_P&#x2F;media-session&#x2F;324b6a56-2d97-409a-a050-e2d604d9b6f6&#x2F;d&#x2F;clips&#x2F;e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1&#x2F;6b40fb94-6e91-42bd-98be-ae3c00026970&#x2F;d8848081-fd2a-4a38-ab31-b0890145a8c6&#x2F;audio&#x2F;direct&#x2F;t1695757865&#x2F;BONUS_FTC_Chair_Lina_Khan_Talks_Amazon,_Anti-Trust.mp3" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;26043.mc.tritondigital.com&#x2F;OMNY_SOUNDON_P&#x2F;media-sess...</a>

Loving this action by FTC. Amazon is the worst kind of predatory market provider - they are literally aliexpress + &quot;steal good ideas from real companies&quot; kind of grift.

I don&#x27;t like it, but I kind of don&#x27;t blame them because it&#x27;s, frankly, a rational act.<p>Everyone vies for control&#x2F;power. Once you have control, you can exert pressure to get more from less (this is essentially what &quot;bullying&quot; is). There&#x27;s nothing (but any laws set up to counteract this) stopping you, so you do it, because relative to you, there&#x27;s only upside. Can you really blame these entities for taking advantage?<p>Literally, the thing we all want more of (success and control), will turn us into bullies. Veeeeery few people, or companies, get to that point and then continue to &quot;play fair&quot;, at least completely. So we set up the system with rules we think will limit this, but it&#x27;s not perfect, so rules get exploited.<p>In games (which are systems and sets of rules), one of the most fun things is to discover an &quot;exploit&quot;. Sometimes this comes from a developer oversight, sometimes this comes from rule complexity leading to unexpected states, sometimes from bugs. I remember figuring out how to get an extra enchant on a weapon in Neverwinter Nights (I somehow got 1 past the supposed limit) and how fun that felt. But there was no cost to other people in doing this. (At worst, if I found too many exploits, the game would stop being fun due to not being challenging, and I would just &quot;cheese&quot; through it.)<p>Amazon is a bully that is cheesing its way through the rules, at some unknown but probably large success cost to many other people vying for the same control. Perhaps it&#x27;s time to dismantle the bully dominating the schoolyard lunches.

I find the premise that Amazon has a monopoly to be pretty far fetched. I order goods online from various shops all the time.

Good. Amazon lies to customers too. They will tell me things like go down to UPS and buy a box and we will refund the cost, then when you chat back they waste hours and request screenshots and then still refuse to issue the refund. They started treating customers like dirt and refusing to honor their own policies within the last year or so. Additionally they will do things like end the chat abruptly or transfer you around 15x repeating the same questions over and over. In another case they promised a full refund and only after I returned the item told me I wouldn’t get a refund due to “restocking fees”. Its too egregious to not be intentional. I will specifically spend more money just to avoid them because the wasted time and frustration isn’t worth any marginal savings.

At the root, the problem with big tech is the monopolization of people&#x27;s attention. There is essentially no way to gain any meaningful exposure to users without going through big tech platforms and they limit the exposure. Even if you buy ads from them, you never know if your product is being put in front of real users or bots. They seem to favor big, established companies.<p>I also blame modern journalism for being heavily centered around corporate interests. They won&#x27;t cover any product or tech which isn&#x27;t backed by big corporations. That is a major source of anti-competitive dynamics. It feels like every journalist has been bribed to the eyeballs to only cover products from certain companies.

FTC is misguided.<p>They just punish Amazon for being successful.<p>On the other hand, they (DOJ) should use the maximum might of the criminal law to prosecute using fraud statutes for sellers (and Amazon itself) when ratings have been manipulated, resulting in decades in prison.

Finally. This is the kind of thing that needs to happen to all of these giant corporations and utilities fighting for monopolies.<p>Incidentally I heard today how many laws against anti-competitive behavior were stripped with Carter and Reagan onward, and it&#x27;s become a trend in our hyper-corporatist world now that&#x27;s hurting workers and income classes below the highest.<p>Watch &quot;DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet&#x27;s Ensh*ttification - Cory Doctorow&quot; on YouTube<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;rimtaSgGz_4?si=bZRjT1eeu4YBZJJJ" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;rimtaSgGz_4?si=bZRjT1eeu4YBZJJJ</a>

I don’t understand this point:<p>&gt;&gt;&gt; For example, if Amazon discovers that a seller is offering lower-priced goods elsewhere, Amazon can bury discounting sellers so far down in Amazon’s search results that they become effectively invisible. &gt;&gt;&gt;<p>This means if Amazon sees a lower price elsewhere they effectively make the product unavailable on their site? Or is it more complicated than that.<p>On the face of it, while I am open to the stance this is monopolistic, I can naively understand why Amazon wouldn’t want to offer a product at a price that isn’t competitive.<p>I’m sure there’s more to it, can someone explain?

Made a purchase that was cancelled with shop with points. The points won&#x27;t return and are &quot;stuck in limbo&quot;. Cancelled Order doesn&#x27;t show in order history either. I&#x27;ve contacted support with at least 50 support agents over several months and the standard you won&#x27;t be charged if it&#x27;s cancelled templated response is all they can muster to reply with. There&#x27;s no way to contact anyone besides the templated responses. Essentially 900 dollars are gone and no support possible.

These lawsuits are simply performances designed to rid the next administration’s power to do a real lawsuit. It will give Amazon a slap on the wrist and keep the company in monopoly.

I used to be an FBA seller and made an exit via sale to private equity (i.e. an aggregator). The FTC will likely fail on all or most fronts imo. Amazon&#x27;s price fixing helps consumers because they simply don&#x27;t show you the product if it&#x27;s not the best price on the web. FBA fees are not &quot;profits&quot; taken by Amazon because logistics is not a profit-center for their business. Copying successful third party sellers&#x27; products, as annoying as it is (it happened to me more than once), doesn&#x27;t appear to break any laws. Advertising costs keep rising yes, but again, how is that illegal? At some point, there may be an opportunity for some young entrepreneurial minded person to create their own marketplace open to third party sellers and undercut Amazon&#x27;s commission (currently 15pct in most categories) and have cheaper advertising costs due to lower competition. The reason why currently this is likely not viable is that FBA is still faster and cheaper than any other existing fulfillment service last I checked. The margin difference between lower commission+cheaper advertising vs more expensive (and slower) fulfillment is still - I believe - in Amazon&#x27;s favor. FBA, by the way, is open to use even if you sell on your own website. The service is called Amazon MCF (multi channel fulfillment), but the cost and speed is not as good as real FBA. I often wondered what Amazon gains by offering MCF and can&#x27;t help but think it has something to do with making the appearance of not being anti-competitive.

Amazon should just change their business model. Instead of requiring sellers sell their products for a competitive price on Amazon they should do the same thing Apple does and just charge sellers a large margin on sells on their platform. Obviously this would mean higher prices for consumers but if the problem here is that Amazon is forcing sellers to price products lower than they&#x27;d like then that would fix the issue.

Long overdue. Amazon charges unfair seller fee for listing, closing and referral. We end up paying 27-32% for each apparel sold. We&#x27;ve been advertising on their website since 2021, every day and lately the results are just poor. Amazon should be held accountable for their business practices. It has become a platform that doesn&#x27;t favour the seller one single bit.

Nice to finally see this, so many years after online retailers (read: Amazon) were given total exemptions from sales tax in order to not “stifle innovation”. We subsidized the destruction of brick and mortar retail, and by extension, many of the retail spaces that served as community anchors. It will take decades to recover, if it’s even possible at this point.

&quot;anti-discounting tactics&quot;<p>&gt; One set of tactics stifles the ability of rivals to attract shoppers by offering lower prices. Amazon deploys a sophisticated surveillance network of web crawlers that constantly monitor the internet, searching for discounts that might threaten Amazon’s empire. When Amazon detects elsewhere online a product that is cheaper than a seller’s offer for the same product on Amazon, Amazon punishes that seller. It does so to prevent rivals from gaining business by offering shoppers or sellers lower prices<p>Price competition conflated as punishment. The FTC&#x27;s mandate is to promote competition. Here, they attack Amazon for competing effectively.<p>Also, advocating for other online superstores is playing the world&#x27;s smallest violin. Walmart has decimated mom and pop stores. They&#x27;re unable to beat Amazon at the online game. Truly remarkable achievement, really.<p>Why are redactions even permitted in a lawsuit involving a government agency and a corporation? Don&#x27;t mention Project Nessie at all if you can&#x27;t tell the public what you&#x27;re arguing about. &quot;Trust us, they were monopolists&quot; isn&#x27;t the same as laying out the facts for all to see.

In my opinion, as an ex-employee, Amazon is intentionally abusive to its sellers, content creators, customers, and employees. I&#x27;ll never buy or sell anything on Amazon again (or patron their related businesses, like Zappos, Abe Books, etc.), but I hope this lawsuit changes things for those who do.

This is a classic antitrust case. Like the film studios in Hollywood controlled talent, finance, production and distribution, Amazon controls too many parts of the process giving them undue market power with which they abuse their so called partners. They should absolutely be broken up.

They only passively mentioned fulfillment.<p>The fact that Amazon owns the market <i>and</i> fulfillment <i>and even last-mile delivery</i> is the most obvious case of <i>vertical integration</i> I have ever heard of, and I personally interact with it in some way <i>at least once every week</i>!

The measure of these services shouldn&#x27;t be if you can sell a new product and make money.<p>It should be that you can sell a cheaper, better version of an Amazon basics product and overtake it.<p>If there is literally no way to do that... Amazon is clearly a market manipulator.

When Microsoft was accused of monopolistic behavior for integrating IE into the OS IIRC it was the DOJ who went after them. In this case, it&#x27;s the FTC, seems like it should be the DOJ to go after Amazon based on Microsoft&#x27;s case.

Hm. From an American law standpoint, this suit is thin on the ground for consumer harm. I can see the <i>competitor</i> harm, but IIUC US antitrust is generally grounded in consumer harm.<p>I&#x27;ll have to see the argument they actually make in court.

I hope this works. There hasn&#x27;t been a big monopoly break up since the 1982 break up of AT&amp;T. And with this conservative supreme court, I&#x27;m not holding my breath that this will actually go through.

Are there any useful alternatives? I tried Walmart+, but they make you feel guilty to tip the drivers and their search function is mediocre. Also, comparing to Amazon, the prices seem higher or equal.

What this world needs is pro-active legislation.<p>The current state of Amazon is the result of a very slow trajectory taking 20 years. It happened in plain sight and still we allow it to grow until it&#x27;s a monster where most of commerce has to submit to.<p>We allow Google to become the leading search engine, advertiser, browser maker, mobile operating system maker. Effectively owning the internet. These should be 4 companies, not one. And even the 4 companies should not be of the current size.<p>Stop allowing companies to grow into platforms, gatekeepers, monopolists that squeeze everybody dry.<p>The current state is anti-market and anti-capitalistic. There no longer is any market when you allow these monstrosities.

It&#x27;s not a coincidence that Bezos ran for the hills exactly like the Google founders did, with the anti-trust writing on the walls. Bill Gates did the same thing as well (although he stuck it out a bit longer), exiting with the anti-trust heat.<p>They&#x27;re all terrified of the invasive investigations and what could be revealed, the scrutiny they&#x27;d be persistently under, and the time demands involved (it&#x27;s no doubt miserable battling the government in a major anti-truist suit).

Was there a similar action taken against Walmart when they were crushing small and large suppliers alike?

Will they ever go after Ticketmaster?

Amazon makes more gross profit in a day than the FTC has revenue in a year. Good luck!

Good news for a change. Government is supposed to protect us from business.

The lawsuit is a joke and I&#x27;d bet $100 that the government will lose.

Another case of Kahn trying to go after companies for being successful.

Do Shopify next! And Apple&#x27;s 30% tax is literally outrageous!

huh. i didn’t know the FTC did this. i thought anti trust was federal territory with DOJ. is TFA just borrowing the word monopoly and this isn’t an anti trust case?

Good!<p>Does this mean FTC got a new spine (or have I misunderstood and they had one all the time)?<p>If so:<p>Can I also suggest someone looks into:<p>- Googles abuse of market position to take over the browser market<p>- Microsoft trying to abuse their market position to take over the browser market (again)<p>?

What&#x27;s the alternative?<p>Nationalize all online selling, and have a central pricing authority?<p>Where does one draw the line, with an interest in <i>not</i> taking it to the extreme?

It feels like things are getting better.

&quot;most customer-centric company&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t think anybody actually buys that line.<p>Do they believe that internally?

Time to buy AMZN?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;law&#x2F;the-hedge-fund-that-made-a-killing-betting-against-lina-khan-d5b395b1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;law&#x2F;the-hedge-fund-that-made-a-k...</a>

Hopefully it works. Amazon has done so much damage to this world....

Lets hope this doesnt become a secret trial like the google one.

Fucking finally

Where does the fine go? Seems to be a great recipe.

Why now?

I&#x27;m honestly not sure how you could make the case that they aren&#x27;t maintaining and abusing monopoly power. I mean they literally blatantly copy the designs of other companies who sell on amazon, then put their own results for their own products higher in search results than what they copied off of. It&#x27;s incredibly blatantly anti-competitive.

Maybe interesting to some, but during the recent Google updates (core and &quot;helpful&quot;), Amazon had more than $100M of search traffic value wiped out,<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;5HpZT6Z.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;5HpZT6Z.jpg</a><p>Google absolutely launched a nuke at Amazon.