The retail and ads portions here seem inextricably linked. It does not seem possible to treat those as separate things.
What's more, if you tell amazon "no more retail ads", surely they can just do what normal stores do, and charge a slotting fee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee) instead.
If right now the first 10 results on amazon.com for "mattress" are all ads because those companies paid $1000 to be advertised first, how is that meaningfully different from amazon only carrying 10 mattresses at all, and instead of charging ad fees, charging a $1000 slotting fee to the mattress companies?
I am not particularly arguing for or against anything, just speculating that breaking it up would, in practice, be hard. Perhaps some other regulatory action would work better.
There’s a $40bn/yr business here. I’m sure somebody can figure out how to decouple.
Also, many breakup scenarios for Amazon involve spinning out the fulfillment business. Who cares if Amazon.com stocks 10 mattresses if I can just build a competitor stocking 10,000 while using the same infrastructure.
Facebook in particular given that their erroneous metrics literally put several media companies out of business. Not only did they charge for nonexistent engagement, but the BS engagement numbers they were providing were so enticing that it created a huge push towards expensive-to-create video content.
I am not sure people are really prepared to take the implication of how unfair Amazon seems to its logical conclusion, because it means undermining a lot of what makes us comfortable in modern life under capitalism. Regulation targeted at increasing competition (breakups, rather than regulation Amazon as a monopoly of a kind and entrenching them) might result in a better outcome, or it just might make things more expensive and then you have to repeat the same breakup and regulation process again every 15 years.
On a global scale, it helps if your country is where all the biggest companies are coming from, especially to compete with big companies from other countries.
> Is it? Newspapers aren’t exactly thriving and it’s not because of Amazon.
Would you have a problem if a random local newspaper company had significant influence over what 50% of the U.S. bought, watched, read, listened to, ate, and needed for medical purposes in addition to market power that made it stay that way?
Except the issue isn't whether there are "dozens of other ways of buying things online, people just choose not to" but whether Amazon's market share is so large as to prohibit anyone from being able to compete with it.
What's more, if you tell amazon "no more retail ads", surely they can just do what normal stores do, and charge a slotting fee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee) instead.
If right now the first 10 results on amazon.com for "mattress" are all ads because those companies paid $1000 to be advertised first, how is that meaningfully different from amazon only carrying 10 mattresses at all, and instead of charging ad fees, charging a $1000 slotting fee to the mattress companies?
I am not particularly arguing for or against anything, just speculating that breaking it up would, in practice, be hard. Perhaps some other regulatory action would work better.