[caslon]

Corporations are made of employees. Even their executives are just employees! Employees, as you might know, are people! They have opinions and preferences of all sorts!

The high-value workers and executives for Amazon are located exclusively in progressive areas. They probably raised a fuss and Amazon didn't want another Tim Bray situation. Given that the corporation loses nothing and gains a degree of loyalty from its employees, it wins.

[inglor_cz]

"the corporation loses nothing"

Do you believe that? I would say such decisions are far from riskless, they can even jumpstart potential competitors and drag Amazon et al into future antitrust litigations. This kind of power being exercised wantonly tends to attract hostile attention.

"Corporations are made of employees... They have opinions and preferences of all sorts!"

They are, but we do not really know how many employees would prefer X or Y. There wasn't any internal ballot on this topic, AFAIK. It may well be the case of a tail wagging the dog.

[inglor_cz]

Microsoft is here in 2021 as well. IBM, too. But they aren't the powers that they used to be.

Book selling is highly symbolic for Amazon, because they grew out of this niche. Also, banning books has a specific bad taste associated, because that is what authoritarians over the ages have done and liberal people resented such bans.

[inglor_cz]

Bans are mostly local affairs. For a shop, if they refuse to carry a certain book, they have effectively banned it from their domain of power, which is what matters.

I know that they once removed 1984 from Kindles due to a copyright issue. Some people noticed even then. But a momentum of interest takes some time to build up. If Amazon starts expanding their blacklists frequently, it will attract more and more attention.

[caslon]

They've been doing it for quite a while; RMS pointed out that they retroactively removed 1984 from people's libraries nearly a decade ago. No regulator cared then, no regulator will care now.

Banning books isn't a particularly controversial thing; this isn't even banning them, it's just...not selling them.

[caslon]

> Do you believe that? I would say such decisions are far from riskless, they can even jumpstart potential competitors and drag Amazon et al into future antitrust litigations. This kind of power being exercised wantonly tends to attract hostile attention.

I guarantee you that Amazon is still going to be here in ten years. At most for antitrust, it would have AWS and the core shopping business split up. But that would happen anyway. It's not really wantonly to take an ethical stand, even if the ethical stand is mostly for show, or even if it's outright wrong. Especially not in a field like bookselling, that Amazon has nowhere close to a monopoly in.

> They are, but we do not really know how many employees would prefer X or Y. There wasn't any internal ballot on this topic, AFAIK. It may well be the case of a tail wagging the dog.

We pretty much know for Amazon, though. Its valuable employees are rich people on the coasts. Overwhelmingly, this demographic is pro-LGBT and against getting put in a higher tax bracket. They aren't going to vote against liberalism.

[throwaway53453]

The corporation doesn't get loyalty, they get employees who will keep doing this in the future.

[caslon]

That's loyalty, because it implies the employees are more likely to stick around. Employees that feel their input is valued more often than not do.

[inglor_cz]

Maybe some employees will be less likely to stick around, too.

It is unlikely that every employee gets their input valued. The game of favoritism is older than Amazon, even older than the written word. Usually, a small clique gets to the top and gets their input valued quite a lot - at the expense of everybody else. Some people are more talented in office politics than others.

For the "everybody else", it means either curry favour with the clique or get out.

[caslon]

The minority of conservatives in progressive cities on the West Coast are cheaper to replace than the majority of liberals, though. It's how the market works.

[throwaway53453]

lol you have a twisted view of capitalism if you think it's about abusing workers

[caslon]

How is any of this abusive? It's a scenario where a minority of workers in a geographic area decide they no longer agree with their employer, and voluntarily quit. The market implies it's cheaper to replace them, because they're few, than it is to replace many workers.

[throwaway53453]

That's if you assume the majority of employees agree. Most either don't care or are scared to speak out.