[swalsh]

In my opinion, Amazon is guilty of anti-competitive behavior. By operating a market place at the same as operating the worlds largest online retailer the interests of the two businesses result in actions that are not necessary in the best long term best interests of the consumer. When a product in the market place is successful, Amazon the retailer, on a regular basis decides to compete with the smaller vendor, often forcing them out of the market due to Amazon the marketplace favoring their own products. This reduces competition in the long run. Unfortuantely due to their size, and the fact that Amazon has become the defacto product search engine (since it's hard to get decent placement in google without paying a large sum) Smaller retailers are forced to use their services, so "not participating in the market place" is not an option. Added to that, Amazon has a policy of requring market place participants to list ALL products in their catalogs, this means that if you're a multi-channel seller, and you don't want to expose your best sellers to Amazon they can delist your items (and they DO enforce this policy).