[stuart78]

The Amazon case in this article seems to fall flat in the same way the Apple as Monopoly argument does. It works only if you ignore the fact of categorical choice (Android in the case of Apple). No seller is forced to sell on Amazon, as demonstrated by the thousands of Shopify and Etsy-hosted sellers out there. Yes, within the world of Amazon, Amazon sets the rules, but if the users leave, so will the sellers.

Shopify, Instagram, TikTok, Magento and the dozens of other ways to sell goods online offer an alternate path, and while Amazon may dominate today, tomorrow is never certain.

(Edit: spelling error)

[jjoonathan]

If competition is what's supposed to protect us from rentier nobility, we ought to police anticompetitive practices with more vigor than a frozen snail.

[echelon]

> Apple as Monopoly argument

> competition is what's supposed to protect us from rentier nobility

Google and Apple won smartphones, and now they get to tax everyone forever. Innovation in that space is dead, as both companies leech off of their earlier success.

That's so fucked.

An enormous amount of innovation capital is going straight into Apple and Google's pockets for what amounts to a distribution racket.

For so many things, you have to do mobile. Web apps are truly second class citizens, and most people do computing on smartphones instead of laptops and desktops.

So you adopt the app distribution model: then you're faced with the App Store and and all its toxic warts. Paid ad placement against your trademark. Draconian rules. Forced tech upgrade cycles. Inability to deploy on your own company's cadence. Break the rules, and you're out. No runtimes, fat taxes, no customer relationship.

Tech didn't used to be this authoritarian. We had a twenty year period of nearly unfettered freedom.

Apple and Google can't be both the hardware and the software of phones. That's wholly unfair to every other class of business.

We need four or more options for phones. Not two. And they shouldn't be able to unilaterally act as gods to block your access to millions of Americans. These aren't gaming consoles.

[globalnode]

We need a little more institutional oversight for the benefit of everyone else. But it seems government is in the clutches of big tech and special interest groups with big money. So I wont hold my breath on that.

[brnaftr361]

I think it's too much oversight that allows these sort of behaviors. Too many moats that are too deep and too wide.

If GIMP could ship with the Photoshop key map and have nigh 1:1 behaviors these things become commodities and thus must compete for distinguishment. As it stands Photoshop is there almost exclusively as a product of inertia and so Adobe can leave it to stagnate.

[jjoonathan]

I see "less oversight is One True Way to encourage competition" more as a conservative talking point than as a good faith anti-monopoly proposal. As a tactic, deregulation seems to be very good at reinforcing the social order (it's usually exploitable in proportion to current standing) but extremely mediocre at encouraging competition when compared to the alternatives.

If you ask a business about their moats, they'll talk your ear off about network effects, two sided markets, last mile infrastructure, brand power, property portfolios, scale... and if you listen from the inside, you'll hear about dumping, bribery, buying out competitors, and leveraging existing monopolies into adjacent domains. Sure, once in a blue moon regulatory capture will slip onto that list as a minor player, but it's the clumsy scrawny kid on Team Anticompetition. It might deserve 10%, maaaaybe 20% of your trust-busting efforts -- but 100%? There are only two reasons to give it 100% of your attention: either you don't know the bigger, stronger, nastier members of the anti-competition team (implausible, if you've been in business for any period of time) or you have an ulterior motive. Since there's an obvious and massively profitable ulterior motive, I tend to believe in incentives over words on this one.

While regulatory capture is real and it's a problem and the solution is deregulation, I am mighty suspicious whenever I see this proposal alone rather than in a lineup of more traditional trust-busting strategies like Sherman Act litigation or tax policy, which tend to fall on the other side of the big/small govt debate.

[brnaftr361]

>it's usually exploitable in proportion to current standing

As I reckon it, standing is derived from the system. The system gives license to Apple to patent certain aspects of design, trademarks, etc. They don't have a truly market-derived end, what they have is derived from a much greater system in competition with others who've been borne similarly by systemic effects rather than market pressure. Restoring market pressures by breaking down such walls - certainly a progressive talking point - seems more likely to induce competition and thus affecting prices and priorities across the board.

I'd also make the aside here that I expect a large proportion of the businesses extant today existed in a "pre-capture" environment and made up the "post-capture" environment up for themselves, that is to say they wrote the book on what defines dumping by bribery which also bought them the lax oversight on antitrust - giving them license to subsume competition and permeate the market and expand.

That is to say take away an avenue like IP from companies like Adobe for example, and commodify their products. Conversely, giving competitors license to make bold faces copies of competitor's products results. In either case, I would expect the end to be very similar: more real competition as in driven by market pressure and selection.

With that said, such a policy wouldn't remedy conglomeration, which I would definitely submit is a problem, but ostensibly in many domains this would be a self-correcting as the barrier of entry doesn't require reinventing the wheel as a non-wheel-geometric-rolling-variation-on-a-circle-that's-never-quite right.

[dan-allen]

Like how a serf could move their crops to a more generous lord.

It’s a false dichotomy that you either have one monopolistic company or perfect competition. Like almost everything, it’s a spectrum.

Apple and Google aren’t monopolies, they’re oligopolies. That’s better but a far cry from efficient competition. Compare their 30% App Store cut to online stock brokers which charge single-digit percentage fees and also require significant infrastructure and compliance overhead. They’d love to charge more but they’re in a sea of competitors who would eagerly steal away their customers.

[stuart78]

Commerce led by mega aggregators has a long history in the US. Walmart and Sears to name two that were dominant in earlier generations. Both of those companies pushed suppliers to adhere to high / punishing standards as well. While those companies were dominant in their time, a key part of the reason all three have done so well is that they serve the actual customer better than the alternative. Sears was like the internet on paper. Walmart radically expanded the inventory available to shoppers across the country. Amazon does both of these things 10x more efficiently.

I am not naive to the many valid critiques of all three, but the customer benefit is an important part of the discussion that seems consistently forgotten. It is so critical because customer preference and changing market dynamics are what ended the reign of both Sears and Walmart and they are what will do the same to Amazon. But until then, Amazon has figured out how to deliver stuff to my door quickly and inexpensively.

One small example. When I was young I loved music and in my medium sized town there was one record store with two locations. It was fine, and they would order in anything you asked for, but limited inventory available browsing. In the 90s Best Buy, Barnes and Noble and a few other now-forgotten big box retailers came to town. The impact was immense. Inventory went up ~100x over this period and price went down. And the breadth was amazing. Huge classical and Jazz sections, neither of which had much presence at the independent shop. The independent shop survived too. They had Ticket sales, hippie merch and a more specialized catalog. Wonderful differentiation in offerings. Now markets have shifted many times over since those days. Some retailers (including the record shop) have adapted others have not. So it goes.

[dangus]

Walmart.com is another seller marketplace that does big volumes and works similarly to Amazon.

Still, I think Amazon is doing some pretty anticompetitive things, and the FTC lawsuit against them seems like it has merit in my layperson’s eyes.

Nobody else besides Amazon can get a random product to my door in under 12 hours for any reasonable cost. If I buy the product direct from the manufacturer I often get charged shipping. That situation could be easily argued to be a monopoly.

Apple vs. Google isn’t that much of a choice, either. There used to be so many smartphone options: BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Symbian all existed at the same time as the iPhone and Android.

Now it’s just two, and most governments don’t seem all that interested in curtailing some of their most anticompetitive practices.

You don’t have to be a pure monopoly be in a small group of “lords” with a position of power that cannot possibly be overturned.

[TapWaterBandit]

> Nobody else besides Amazon can get a random product to my door in under 12 hours. If I buy the product direct from the manufacturer I often get charged shipping. That situation could be easily argued to be a monopoly.

Why do Amazon have a monopoly on this? Is it because they are engaging in anti-competitive practices preventing competitors from offering the same thing or do they just have the best logistics expertise and setup in the industry?

That's a genuine question btw because it matters a lot for whether or not regulation/the state should attempt to resolve it.

[dangus]

They were a first mover and have captured the market to the point where no amount of private investment could spawn a true competitor.

You have to have Amazon’s sales volume before owning a delivery and logistics empire makes any financial sense, and you can’t provide Amazon’s level of service and low costs without owning your own global logistics company.

Then you’ve got the fact that Amazon’s technology infrastructure is a profit center. In contrast, any e-commerce competitor has to pay retail rates for cloud computing or run a data center as a cost center. Amazon e-commerce lost money for decades while AWS propped it up.

The anticompetitive practices come from the ways in which they exploit this enviable position, like the issue the FTC is suing them over where they are charging their merchants money to fight over search ranking, and knowingly promoting inferior and/or less relevant products with the result of raising prices for consumers and merchants artificially. Merchants can’t refuse to play the game because if you don’t sell on Amazon you lose most of the addressable customer base.

[kiba]

Nothing preclude from Amazon being good at shipping products while still engaging in anticompetitive behaviors.

[esafak]

Amazon built its own logistics network to improve its service and margins. I don't think they ought to be punished for it. To do so would be to deny economies of scale.

[dangus]

Being successful is okay, but abusing your success isn’t.

[jrflowers]

> It works only if you ignore the fact of categorical choice (Android in the case of Apple)

This is a good point because feudalism is when there is just one big fief. If another fief appears both cease to have the quality of feudalism, that’s what capitalism is.

[orwin]

No? If this is irony ank mocking GP's point (which admittedly had nothing to do with the claim, I agree), it's a little bit too subtle.

[Lamad1234]

As if "Shopify, Instagram, TikTok" are any better.. They are also fiefdoms and unless you are platformed by any of these big lords, you kinda don't exist (digitally at least).. In a way, I am kinda glad much of humanity still prefer running on pen and paper and cash and refuses to sell itself to computers.