[dalbasal]

Note the scale here:

Conspirators paid $100k in bribes. "Products and merchants earned in excess of $100 million in sales revenue."

I haven't heard the job titles of the amazon employees yet, but presumably these are not very senior people. In terms of corruption dynamics, Amazon is now like a planning authority where a friendly official can rubber stamp a large fortune into a real estate developer's pocket.

Also note that, like with government corruption a lot of corruption stays just to the left of criminal red lines. Many former employees of large marketplaces (amazon, FB ads, adwords) move into the more lucrative seller side, either as employees or consultants. They are expected to bring inside knowledge and contacts to the table.

There have already been serious antitrust cases (eg the EU adwords case) concerning these marketplaces. More are coming. Meaningful fines or enforcement is yet to be seen.

Now, $100m corruption incidents.

I'm putting my money on the table now. Tech monopolies are the major political-economic issue of the 2020s.

[zozin]

This is what inevitably happens when you centralize power/authority/buying options for consumers. Amazon can make or break a business/product line. Centralization also makes it much easier for those who are willing to cheat their way to the top.

To a certain extent Amazon's dominance has also directly led to the Web being filled with listicles. It's much easier to write up a list of "recommended" products when all of your referral links can point to Amazon, which is a trusted source of ecommerce for a majority of Americans. It would be much harder for listicles to be as profitable if consumers had 10+ Amazons to choose from when doing their online shopping.

[Jsharm]

I was thinking this, $100k for taking on that level of risk?

[dalbasal]

Corruption cases are often like this. You look at the case itself and think "this money for that much risk?"

Ehud Olmert was removed from office as Israel's Prime Minister for taking bribes (in exchange for rezoning) years earlier as mayor of Jerusalem. The amounts seem very petty. About $25k IIRCC. We actually went from Prime Ministership to jail over it.

I suspect the reason these bribes always seem petty is that only a fraction are uncovered. These people take bribes regularly, sometimes for decades. They get busted for one or two.

[dogma1138]

$100K for a staffer that reviews merchants and product listings is probably more than their yearly salary, in fact it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s not even about double.

This aren’t people on high comp packages the bulk of Amazon’s workforce even if you discount the warehouses isn’t paid SV salaries.

[snovv_crash]

It's amazing what a disgruntled employee will do, and how little it takes to make them do it.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

A survey says the you can compromise most employees for $500.

I wanted to do a website called "Ransom Rewards" allowing you to sign up to ransomware your own employer and you could set your own price to pick up data for a research paper but it was considered unethical to even imply you could get paid to fuck over your employer :(

[dalbasal]

Maybe you should start by surveying the ethics board, and then just pay them $500 to find it ethical. Bootstrapping.

[sofargone00]

I am assuming that these 100 million in revenue bought in wasn't overnight... and I can guarantee that these reps were paid on a continuity basis.

[dalbasal]

You might equally assume that the 100 million of revenue uncovered in this case was not the only $100 million dollars earned this way on amazon.

In any case, it's hard to know quite what these numbers represent specifically. You also don't really know exactly what a real estate developer "earned" by bribing a city planner to approve his building.

Take it as an approximation, an estimate of the scale. The $trn market caps and >$100bn revenues of modern tech monopolies can dwarf everything else.

Make no mistake though, $100m in sales is entry level industry-scale. That is, there are industries where $100m of sales due to outright bribery of market officials (what amzn employees are) is enough to make the industry a corrupt industry.

[rtx]

>They are expected to bring inside knowledge and contacts to the table.

This is not always unethical, we exclusively hire former AdWords account mangers for our sem team. This primarily done for branding and reducing the recruitment cost.

[sidlls]

If the market is unhealthy (e.g. a monopoly exists in some cases) then it is very much as unethical or illegal as their (former) employers’ market position is: they’re literally leveraging the same conditions to extract value.

[dalbasal]

Ethical is a broad term. It's not illegal, or in violation of any industry ethics standards that I know of.

That said, it's not illegal (in the US) for politicians to receive payments from companies for consulting, giving lectures or such. It's not illegal (in most countries) to hire former staffers for a politician you wish to lobby as lobbyists, compliance officers or such. I would say that most people do consider some of these ethically questionable.

IMO, the issue is one of nuance and scale. The more subjective, arbitrary or ilegible decisions these employees can make, the larger the risk of corruption. The more employees can make these decisions, the larger the risk. The larger the economic impact of these decisions, the larger the risk.

This case, demonstrates a dangerous nexus. The marketplace has a lot of moderation (or whatever amzn call it). Subjective decision making. Culprits removed suspensions on sellers and products in exchange for naked bribes. For adwords, that might be ad copy approval, adsense categorization. IDK if an adwords account managers can affect quality score, but that would be a big one. I suspect they can. A lot of amazon and google employees make these decisions, another scale for the nexus. These decisions are worth a fortune. In this case, $100m in sales.

Subjective decisions made by many people affecting very large sums.

Once you are at Google or amazon scale, this is big money corruption. $100m in sales. There are whole industries where whoever wins at amazon marketplace, facebook ad market or adwords wins a major market.

In terms of ethics... Ethics either works against some sort of professional or societal standard (eg legal or medical ethics) or you have to examine it from a "who is harmed and is that fair" perspective. Here amazon itself was harmed, so it's straight crime. In other cases, it might be unfair to competitors or consumers. If you are outperforming your competitors on adwords because you hired the most well connected former account manager... I can see where competitors would consider this unfair.

[kome]

Amazon is a soviet union cybernetics wet dream.

Jokes side: Do you see society coming to realize that a similar system can actually implement a planned economy for real?

[lallysingh]

Who takes the hit when the demand projections are off?

[gazzini]

Bingo! Although, this system would categorically eliminate the issue from the following Soviet-era joke:

> A man goes into a shop and asks: “You don’t have any meat?” “No,” replies the lady, “We don’t have any fish, it’s the shop next door that doesn’t have meat.”

Under the new system, the man wouldn’t have to bounce from store-to-store. There would be one convenient online shop with no meat AND no fish.

[Zigurd]

An AI driven command economy does not have to be perfect to outperform a free market. If an AI-driven command economy outperforms free markets, the free market dies, just as when self-driving cars become more cheaply insurable because they cause less insured loss, and stop entailing traffic enforcement costs, the human driven car dies.

[kome]

true, at the same time nowadays the state and the central bank are already taking the hit, at the place of the private economy.