[dmix]

How would this actually work in practice? Do you expect regulators to break out just the book store from the other ecommerce stuff?

Would the whole shipping network, fulfilment, and distribution centers be repeated across all of these companies or would that be a separate company? What about the vendor marketplace and ecommerce code and massive analytics systems they built? Plus customers will have to go to multiple different websites depending on what they want (babystuff.com, bookstore.com, etc)?

These companies can't simply be divided geographically and regionally like oil and telecom companies can, that's counter to how internet companies work. So it'd have to be business unit / divisional.

It's easy to throw around anti-trust laws as a panacea for all the stuff we don't like by tech companies but we seem to be missing the whole concrete picture of what that actually means in practice.

[Spooky23]

I’ve shopped at a Barnes and Noble and a smaller local bookstore for many years. Guess what... somehow they manage to find a way to not sell counterfeit or greymarket shit.

All of these technical issues are problems of Amazon’s creation. Amazon wrote a bunch of software that doesn’t provide a supply chain that can maintain the integrity of what they sell. Sound like their problem.

[cannonedhamster]

Amazon is both a bookseller and a book publishing platform. Those should be split. Just because it's inconvenient for Amazon doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. That's kind of the whole point of antitrust law. The market is not necessarily better when it's efficient because it's controlled by a single entity. Do you all imagine yourselves as future robber barons with mustaches to twirl?

[dmix]

It's not about what's inconvenient. It's about what still makes sense as a single business...

Amazon's publishing platform is only a relatively small part of their wider business and doesn't answer any of my questions.