[benologist]

This article calls it a lack of leadership in open source, but the reality is Bezos is exploiting everyone using Amazon, from people selling shower curtain hooks to video encoding software, open source deployed across AWS, corrupt tax deals and more. Leadership in open source won't instill ethics or charity in the world's richest man who demands his own not-employees work so hard they must sprint to their lunch break or be fired.

Amazon is accused of using sales data belonging to companies selling products on their platform to help them select 10,000s of products to clone and sell in direct competition to their vendors.

https://www.geek.com/news/amazonbasics-is-copying-all-the-be...

They have copied software hosted on AWS in the past too, whatever proprietary software you're hosting on AWS is hemorrhaging privileged usage data they will happily use against you.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn...

[qvrjuec]

> Amazon is accused of using sales data belonging to companies selling products on their platform

Why does this sales data belong to the companies and not Amazon, if they are using the platform? Is it unethical to copy a product or software in a non-infringing way?

[benologist]

I think that data belongs to the merchants, just like an S3-buckets logs belong to the developer. It has to be that way or who else has a claim on the data? HP for printing it? Microsoft because it was sent by email in Office? The EU suspects it is anti-competitive to allow Amazon as a vendor to cherrypick items to clone based on data Amazon collect as a platform.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-...

[ajross]

Would you apply that logic to any reseller? The corner market shouldn't be able to tally how many apples it sold? That just doesn't seem like a consistent legal principle to me. Clearly if you allow someone to sell your product you are implicitly allowing them to record the fact that they did.

There may be an antitrust argument here, but this data ownership thing seems like a non starter.

[zyx321]

Unless it says "Sold by: Amazon.com", Amazon isn't party to the contract. DHL doesn't get to know what is in the package they deliver, so why should Amazon be entitled to that information?

[ajross]

You have a cite supporting that legal theory? Because the fact that it happened on their website using indexing in their database and (especially) that they took payment directly, seems like a pretty strong argument that they ARE a party to the contract.

[mgfist]

Amazon isn't buying the goods though. The store selling the good isn't just selling it to Amazon, so it's not reselling.

[nostrebored]

So Amazon shouldn't be allowed to create any products, or must ignore the data it needs to plan logistics?

[benologist]

If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices and decide to copy your product because they see how profitable you are. The EU's theory is, if this is what is happening, it gives Amazon an unfair advantage and they shouldn't be leveraging your data against you to compete with you.

[sigstoat]

> If you host your website on AWS and store invoices on S3, Amazon can blindly enter your market with a competing offering and it might lose money, or they can go through your invoices...

it is totally absurd to suggest they're looking through customers S3 data.

[pm90]

Who's going to stop them and who's going to investigate them?

I think Americans often ignore the reason behind the EU's deep concerns around privacy and regulation is simply because EU lawmakers have no other power over American corporations. Simply none. The most they can do is excessive financial penalties. They cannot jail Bezos. But what they can do, is impose an absurd financial penalty. Amazon will appeal. It will go to court, and the US State Department will try to help Amazon (an American corporation after all, representing American jobs and American workers) and the penalty will be reduced. The EU public is happy, the EU stuck it to Amazon! But they didn't face any significant consequence for their action, and never will.

If however, this happened in the US, it can get thorny for Amazon. A "lowly" judge in Texas can compel Bezos, the richest man in the world, to appear in court. The implicit threat being that, being in non-compliance would escalate the case until it reached the highest courts, which can compel the Federal Govt. to take action to compel Bezos.

A US judge has that power. No judge in any other country has it. Every other country has no reason to believe Amazon will do as it says. Only some have the power to impose the kind of regulations like GDPR, EU being America's close trading and diplomatic partner.

[benologist]

It's just an analogy, for what they are accused of doing on the retail side of their business.

[ryacko]

Yes, it is absurd, it would be illegal.

They could do the same through widely sold advertising metrics.

[pacala]

Amazon should ignore other people data. Amazon has plenty of its data from its own products, no need to create false dichotomies.

[scarface74]

Are you also opposed to companies making store brands after seeing how well other brands sell in their store?

[gav]

> Amazon is accused of using sales data belonging to companies selling products on their platform to help them select 10,000s of products to clone and sell in direct competition to their vendors.

At the risk of being accused of whataboutism, _everyone_ does this.

The big-box stores go direct to China, often to the same factories that their intermediates were using. Walmart doubled-down on a direct-to-factory approach starting in 2010, moving from 20% to 80% direct with cost savings of 5-15%.

Your grocery store sells private-labelled goods. This market is expected to reach $220 billion by 2020.

The weakening of established brands has enabled large merchants to leverage sales data to drive product lines that provide good/better/best options to the consumer. The fact that Amazon started to sell their own products shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone in the industry. Ten years ago the complaint from brands was "big box stores are killing us", now it's "Amazon is killing us".

Pointing out that Bezos is the world's richest man and claiming he's exploiting people is a tired ad hominem attack.

[threezero]

I notice you had no reply to his comment about exploitation of workers. Why is pointing out Bezos’ massive wealth disparity “tired”? I think it needs to get brought up in every discussion about Amazon to point out how little he cares about other human beings that he accumulates so much wealth at the expense of tens of thousands of people.

[enitihas]

How is Bezos's wealth related to anything? Just because he owns more % shares in Amazon than other founders do in their companies, that makes Amazon exploitative? The Walton family has a similar net worth. Does that add to Walmart's exploitative nature. Does an increase or decrease in Amazon stock price make them good and bad, because the wealth of Bezos changes?

If you want to make an argument of Amazon revenue and growth, fine. If you think their shares are not as divided as other companies and that makes them exploitative, I am not sure what your argument is.

[threezero]

So you’re using whataboutism as an argument. I never said the Waltons weren’t exploitive. My argument is that Bezos is at the extreme for exploitive behavior considering his massive wealth. He could make less money and give his employees more. He could change company policy to improve employees’ lives. Instead he hoards wealth and sucks as much out of his employees as possible.