Ruling at the below link, because apparently every US news reporter is allergic to actually providing source docs in court cases . . .<p><a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.326809/gov.uscourts.wawd.326809.289.0.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.32...</a>
Amazon currently does not honor its prime shipping agreement with all domestic customers and has no customer service path to get the issue resolved. In some places USPS is unreliable and Amazon insists on using it repeatedly, violating its own promise to customers. This suggests to me that Amazon faces no competitive pressure to deliver good customer service.
> Amazon’s practice of coercing sellers who want their products to be Prime eligible into using Fulfillment by Amazon, which makes it more difficult and more expensive for rivals to offer increased product selection.<p>How would this even work? It's on Amazon to deliver your stuff in 2 days but they also have to allow 3rd party shipping they have no control over? Are they allowed to require such a seller to fulfill the order by a specific date?<p>Because to me a lowly customer Prime === Item Shipped by Amazon. That's the whole value.
One can only imagine how authoritarian regimes look at this from the outside. My guess is "The house of bezos has lost favour at the court of the king and is thus to be disbanded and reliefed from oligarch status"..
Competition is the core tenant that makes capitalism beneficial to broader society.<p>Consolidation over the past few decades has limited the capacity for firms to compete in many sectors.<p>So I appreciate the sentiment of what the FTC is trying to do, but they really come across as amateurs bringing far too many lawsuits and often with weak legal reasoning/argumentation.<p>In many of the cases they've brought there exists alternative, yet stronger arguments that could have been made.<p>I'd support congress legislating towards more competition (e.g. forcing open standards for things like APIs/chat clients/smart watches etc), or a more active FTC.<p>But the current approach is far too disorganized and weak.
I hope they include Amazon's practice of taking popular products on their storefront, making generic "Amazon Basics" versions, and selling them to undercut the popular options. Simultaneously owning a marketplace, approving who can and can't sell products on it, and then putting your own products on it to undercut other sellers is so scummy and muck rake-y.<p>I hope they also include Amazon allowing thousands of Chinese retailers to stock Amazon's warehouses with counterfeit, faulty products, and potentially dangerous out-of-spec parts - with no way to meaningfully report or bring the offending product to Amazon's attention.
Reminder that a mere 15 years ago, Walmart was the unfair monopolist whose market position rendered competition infeasible.<p>Also unclear to me why "ecommerce" is a market unto itself that we should be concerned with level of concentration in, as opposed to simply a slice of the broader "retail" market (which is much less concentrated)
More and more, antitrust is a means for people who dislike big, successful companies for no particular reason to attack them. On some level, the government is just throwing its weight around. The message is "don't forget who's really in charge."<p>Consider all the "Lina Khan fans" you see on HN and elsewhere. They rarely articulate why the government should be suing these companies, which laws that company broke, or if those laws make sense. They just don't like big companies and want them taken down a peg.<p>The Google suit was particularly egregious. There was no alternative to Google search because no one had built a better product for reasons that have nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior. And the real irony here is that Google appears to be behind on LLMs, which have finally given us an alternative to typing things into Google. So the government picked the exact moment when Google's search market share is seriously threatened to sue!