[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.