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Amazon faces potential break-up as FTC finalizes antitrust lawsuit | The FTC is getting ready for the big one

Amazon faces potential break-up as FTC finalizes antitrust lawsuit

https://www.techspot.com/news/99562-amazon-faces-potential-break-up-ftc-finalizes-antitrust.html

The suit's main allegation is that Amazon abuses its dominance in the market to reward merchants who use its logistics (warehousing, shipping) and advertising services, punish those...

Amazon faces potential break-up as FTC finalizes antitrust lawsuit | The FTC is getting ready for the big one::undefined

104 comments

Corran1138

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I will believe it when I see it.

mx_smith

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Yeah remember when they were going to break up Microsoft? That went great.

chuckleslord

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Yeah, there the FTC was with a clear market that Microsoft would have a monopoly over should the merger go through. They had Microsoft on the ropes, but, before they could finish them, Microsoft pinky promised prices wouldn't go up. And that was that, no threat of a monopoly and the merger could go through.

... the current antitrust ruling guidelines make enforcement basically impossible.

Eldritch

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It was more that George w Bush was elected. And cracking down on monopolies is against the code of fascists. Ideally they want to be in charge of all the monopolies. So he more or less called off the suit just as they were about to close in on Microsoft.

chuckleslord

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I meant the Microsoft Activision Blizzard fiasco, I guess I didn't realize.

Eldritch

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Oh yes that too. Microsoft is always been bad though. Always will be always has been.

CriticalMiss

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Hell, I won't believe it even when I'll see it. Likely some loophole will be found to dodge this in one way or another.

jeffw

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Not to be pedantic, but isn’t that the same as “I’ll believe it when I see it”? You’re just saying it won’t happen

SpezCanLigmaBalls

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I think they’re saying even if this goes through amazon will find a way to ignore it

TheBat

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Telecom companies are back together, aren't they?

ELI70

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There is mods on lemmy? I just found out there is also karma, why are we recreating a toxic authoritarian shit hole but decentralized?

Zink

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Instances have to be created and run by somebody, so we automatically have a bunch of admins in the loop.

Then somebody has to make communities on the instances. That involves choosing the purpose of the community, and writing any relevant description or guidelines. So again you inherently start with somebody in charge of the community.

But none of them answer to a corporate overlord. Things are run the way the people decide. And if the people disagree, they can run different communities or instances. There can easily be unmoderated communities, and I’m sure there are.

LEDZeppelin

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Came here to say exactly this. Not going to happen.

hayes_

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Damn this thread is negative as hell.

I’m one of the most cynical, pessimistic people I know, but not in here.

Kinda wish people’s first reaction were “good,” not “yeah right, remember Bell in the 80’s?”

Maybe I’m naive, but this seems like good news to me. Even if it doesn’t actually result in Amazon being broken up, at least it indicates someone is doing something.

“Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress” or something like that.

whoisearth

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“Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress” or something like that.

Brings back memories to when Obamacare was announced. Did it go far enough? Hell no. It was a step in the right direction and it was still derided. Those who are ripping down the system brick by brick have a singular vision and understand it's a series of steps to get to their dystopian hellscape. Why are those primary on the left unwilling to accept anything that isn't a fully realized picture of their ideal society?

In fact I'd argue a large part of why the system is falling apart is those who want to see it improved are unwilling to do those small incremental changes for good.

marmo7ade

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Permanently Deleted

some_guy

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Why are those primary on the left unwilling to accept anything that isn’t a fully realized picture of their ideal society?

Because at this point, it seems more like theater than actual intent.

SwampYankee

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The right sure seems convinced we're hurtling leftward with communist dictators like Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden leading the charge with the tenacity of the Bolsheviks of yore. I'm guessing the reality is somewhere in between that and perennial fecklessness.

whoisearth

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What came first, people checking out or the system stopping working for us? Or does it even matter?

TwilightVulpine

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Makes me think about how cynicism pervades online communities and media. Seems like a lot of people can't get themselves to hope. People need hope to accomplish anything.

whoisearth

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People are becoming less and less able to be rationalized with.

A lot of valid triggers have put us here. Housing. Inflation. Income inequality. Identity politics. But it's gotten to the point where people are frothing at the mouth. Daily I see a comment about "eat the rich" and anecdotally they're getting more and more aggressive.

We are tipping toward bloodshed unless things change drastically soon which I doubt will happen.

flop_leash_973

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I think what people are tired of and endlessly pessimistic about is the baby steps of doing something never seems to end. It never gets to the other side of helping the people. People need to see the end goal of where the baby steps are trying to lead us AND see that the likes of Amazon are not able to move faster than those baby steps to nullify the steps.

A lot of the terminally online have been alive long enough to live through multiple examples of how theses kinds of things tend to work. And thus have to ask themselves "why will this time end any different?" Have to do that enough times and it makes you a jaded cynic.

MercuryUprising

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Astroturfing. Amazon has PR teams that come here and sow seeds of "pff it doesn't even matter" in order to make people cynical and complacent.

Steeve

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Yeeaah nah, I can absolutely promise you that Amazon PR isn't wasting their time trying to make a few hundred thousand Lemmy users apathetic lol. This is such a crazy level of paranoia

Chenzo

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Nice Try, Amazon PR Flunky!

Steeve

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And I would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling Lemmings!

Yewb

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Repeat after me: amazon deserves to be broken up!

Also I think amazon is responsible for a measurable spike in inflation

KairuByte

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I highly doubt that. Regular people have no real ability to effect the outcome, and the majority of people are saying “there’s no way this absolutely bullshit situation gets fixed” not “what is there to fix? Nothing is wrong!”

No company is paying their PR to say “Yeah [we] are real pieces of shit that need to be hacked up and thrown to the wind but [we] are gonna come out of this just fine so suck our cocks.”

That isn’t how PR works. At least not till they hit dictator levels of power.

MercuryUprising

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PR people aren't stupid. They know how to muddy the water and make efforts like this seem unimportant because it prevents people from galvanizing. Its the divide and conquer strategy.

UncleGooberleg

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Permanently Deleted

SCB

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I have 3 children and not only don't feel regret, I'm quite optimistic. Perpetually-online Doomers are the only ones feeling that way.

UncleGooberleg

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Permanently Deleted

SCB

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"how dare you be optimistic!" Lol

UncleGooberleg

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Permanently Deleted

SCB

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Im smarter, more successful, more wealthy, and more involved in climate lobbying than you, so I know I win.

Edit: And more attractive. Oh and my Warhammer 40,000 collection is bigger than yours. Oh and I dont mean to brag but my daughter graduates with honors and got a scholarship to college. Also my wife is a smokeshow with a big ol ass.

Edit: Oh also I have good hair.

UncleGooberleg

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Permanently Deleted

marmo7ade

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Permanently Deleted

Steeve

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Progress needs actual progress though, a lot of progressive regulation is put up with absolutely no chance (or intention imo) of going through. It's a bunch of tech regulators with no idea how the tech works throwing out drastic proposals to look heavy handed and tough, because that's what people want to see.

ArcticCircleSystem

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Even if it doesn’t actually result in Amazon being broken up, at least it indicates someone is doing something.

Aren't they just deciding whether or not to do something via the lawsuit rather than actually for sure doing something yet? ~Strawberry

Archer

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It's "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good"

Ogmios

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chaosppe

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Absolutely. we need a lot more of this too.

legion

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This is funny, because I literally said “good!” when I read the post title. So I’m right there with you.

chaosppe

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Absolutely straight, we need a lot more of this too.

half

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Shitting yourself is not better than doing nothing.

DragonAce

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Who in the fuck do they think they're fooling? There hasn't been any sort of large corporate antitrust breakup since Bell Systems in the early 80s. They expect us to believe that after 40 years of inaction, suddenly they're going to do their jobs again? This is nothing but pandering to pad approval ratings. I would love to be wrong, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

bobs_monkey

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This smells like fodder just in time for election season

limit

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Dude, the 80s wasn't 40 years ago...

Damn I got old..

thereisalamp

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The 80s will always be 20 years ago. Y2k was ten years ago, the 2010s didn't happen and we're both old.

dragonflyteaparty

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Damn, there might be a group of us.

JollyTheRancher

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The FTC has actually been crazy busy this administration - https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases - they're really doing far more than at any other point in my lifetime.

Reverendender

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I fully support the FTC burning it all down, but then I read this paragraph, and it did not give me confidence: “The FTC has had Amazon in its sights this year. The company recently agreed to a $5.8 million settlement with the Commission over Ring privacy violations that included employees spying on customers. And in June, the FTC sued Amazon over "deceptive" Prime subscription tactics.”

5.8 million is probably Jeff Bezos’s weekly cheese budget. It’s loose change in his car seat.

SCB

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I fully support the FTC burning it all down

Lol sayin the quiet part out loud

maynarkh

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If it's about burning down the corporate regulatory capture and their stranglehold on markets that killed free market capitalism, then it's not the quiet part. That's the literal mission of the FTC that it hasn't been fulfilling for half a century now.

SCB

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killed free market capitalism

Citation needed.

AccidentalLemming

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Permanently Deleted

jackfrost

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More than half of Amazon's sales come from third-party merchants who this year started paying an average of over 50% commission on every sale, up from 35.2% in 2016, the result of it raising Fulfillment by Amazon fees every year and increasing storage fees.

While paying for Amazon's logistics and advertising services is optional, most merchants consider these, especially advertising, a necessary part of doing business. Moreover, the FTC has reportedly amassed evidence that Amazon disadvantages merchants who don't use the services by giving them lower placements.

Capitalism at its finest... I still remember when Amazon was just a humble online bookstore. How times have changed.

joekar1990

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I would be curious if all these influencers pushing FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) where they got paid for the original thought because there is so much junk flowing into Amazon now especially people trying to use Amazon's logistics.

I can't imagine there is great margin for a product listed on Amazon if half of every sale is given to Amazon for commission.

reversebananimals

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No doubt this is slimy, but does it make Amazon a monopoly? It seems like a tough case for the FTC to win.

grue

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Contrary to popular corporatist disinformation, anti-trust law isn't just for literal control-100.000000%-of-the-market "monopolies." Any company (or colluding group of companies) large enough to unduly influence the market can be subject to it.

That's why it's called "anti-trust" law, not "anti-monopoly" law.

InfiniteVariables

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Not sure but giving your own products preferential placement on what you present to the public as an open marketplace is an anti-competitive behavior that they have been caught doing.

muddybulldog

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Took them ten years to split up AT&T and that was a literal monopoly. Near 100% market share.

throws_lemy

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We need to do the same with Microsoft and Google

kittenbridgeasteroid

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And like the other 10 companies that own pretty much every brand in the country.

Techmaster

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But not Apple? The most valuable company in history.

herrvogel

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Eeeh. Apple's App Store fees can be a bit much, but all told the company doesn't have enough power on any market to warrant such a huge intervention I think. Just forcing them to make their ecosystem more open would be enough. Like how the EU wants to force them to allow 3rd party package managers on iOS.

maynarkh

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Luckily the EU wants much more, and already accepted regulation that will be implemented later this year to open all ecosystems up, completely. iMessage will have to provide an open API that provides the same service levels than the native client for example.

makyo

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Eh they should do it anyway

SCB

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Ideally this is all that will happen with Amazon as well

Smokeless7048

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I want to see the same happen to Apple, to many fingers in too many pies.

Their app store, + cell phone, computer, publishing, music store, streaming service, ect ect.

Want to see google, Microsoft, apple, and others all broken up.

AbidanYre

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They went after MS in the 90s. Nothing really came of it.

Phoenixbouncing

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Yes and no.

The simple fact that you're not using IE6 on MSN with Bing search to access a Windows server is more or less proof that the constraints placed on Microsoft at that time did actually have an impact (even if I felt robbed that the company wasn't split up at the time).

Today the one thing Microsoft is still dominante in is Office software (and even then Google docs is snapping at their heals).

OS? Android is more popular than windows Server OS? Linux rules the roost Browser? Chrome

The company that really needs scrutiny ATM is Google.

kittenbridgeasteroid

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Are you high?

TwilightVulpine

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Disney too

ELI70

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What about facebook, disney, netflix, twitter, apple, uber, airbnb?

SCB

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Uber has direct competition in Lyft, among other rideshares and entrenched taxi companies. Disney and Netflix are literal competitors. You're on an alternative to Twitter right now, and Facebook is yet another. Apple has competitors in every industry. AirBnB has both tons of competition and 26% market share - below Booking.com

maynarkh

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Oligopolies are still not competitive. We need research into finding out what market share starts distorting competition, and tying antitrust to that.

A market with 2 competitors can still be broken down further.

SCB

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Oligopoly has an actual meaning and that meaning isn't "companies I have heard of"

What's funny is you hate Uber because you've heard of them but Yellow Cab had a literal monopolistic chokehold and you didn't give a fuck at all.

Wr4ith

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Doubt. If it somehow works out, do Google next

brap_gobbo

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I'll believe it when I see it. I work with (not for) Amazon every day at my job and they are miserable e-commerce partners. One change in a code that suddenly and wrongly flags your entire international product offerings and pulls them? Good luck begging the teams of bots to "help" you.

With Amazon you don't even have the power to handle your own legitimate brand's data management -- changes to our listings go through maybe 20% of the time-- but somehow ASIN hijackers can make wild and dangerous changes to them with little issue. Not only that, but Amazon buttfucks you with fees on top of fees, like FBA fees we pay to entrust them to handle our products and returns well, but are wasted as our products are often stolen, broken, or return scammed.

If you can help it and you like not crying in the bathroom at work, avoid Amazon.

voidMainVoid

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Easily one of the worst places I've ever worked for, and I wasn't even in a warehouse. Highest turnover I've ever seen. The reports about the company culture are no joke!

Atemu

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I don't think you're the target customer of Amazon. It seems to all be set up for brand-less dayfly companies/scammers reselling shit from AliExpress, not actual long-standing brands.

brap_gobbo

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They do care if you're a massive brand, to the point where you have a human point of contact to the company, but unfortunately we weren't at that size. Anything smaller than massive tends to be ignored. Not even sure if they're still doing that sort of thing, but they did when I started the job.

HawlSera

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God we need a trustbuster

Gyella

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Lol. What a crock of shit. If anyone thinks the oligarchs that run this country will allow this to happen you’re smoking rocks.

This country leads the world in corruption & greed. Nothing will change that but this is great click bait.

Cranakis

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You think the oligarchs make more or less money when Bezos has a monopoly?

I think it may well happen because the oligarchs want Amazon broken up. Biden did appoint Lina Kahn as chair of the FTC. Kahn has long been vocal that Amazon needs to be broken up.

noxy

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This needs to happen. As skeptical as I am that this will result in a break-up, AWS really needs to be busted up away from the rest of Amazon, and that's just to start with.

jungekatz

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Read similar news about meta , google and even microsoft ! Now it feels like a hogwash !

Yondu_the_Ravager

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The FTC hasn’t had a spine in decades, I doubt anything will come of this. It would be nice for once if the government actually gave a shit about monopoly busting, but they don’t care anymore. Not when corporations are legally allowed to bribe the ones making legislation, oh and also companies can be people now

JollyTheRancher

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The FTC has had a spine since 2020, they have been really busy - https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases

xeekei

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Would be great if the US started regulating big tech as harshly as the EU, let's see how they like that.

Historical_General

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So perhaps they'll fart in Amazon's general direction?

elax102

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The FTC is getting ready for the big one

Sounds like it lol

yoz

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Nothings going to happen. Its just another headline that FTC will do something but we know how it goes.

NuclearArmWrestling

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Great, instead of one overvalued company, Jeff Bezos will own majority stakes in multiple overvalued companies.

asphaltkooky

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Permanently Deleted

zerkrazus

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If this does happen, I hope they find a way to do it that doesn't make Bezos and the like richer, like what happened with Standard Oil years ago.

bcrab

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They will settle for increased regulation, knowing their army of lawyers will be able to manage it all while the little guy will get snowed under.

So we’ll see even more small businesses fail while Amazon will continue to grow because the gov’t was lobbied into killing the competition.

SCB

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How exactly does helping small businesses access a worldwide market they otherwise would never get access to cause small businesses to "fail?"

bcrab

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This wouldn’t be about small businesses accessing Amazon’s market - although the original point was that Amazon is becoming a monopoly and is taking advantage of that position with ridiculously high fees and commissions. This will be new regulations created and forced on every business (or ones that grow to a certain size).

Amazon will say, “don’t break the company up, we welcome increased regulations to keep us honest” acting like that is a good compromise that solves the problem.

The intent of the regs will be to stop Amazon from gaining an even bigger monopoly, but the affect will actually be smaller businesses will not be able to manage the increased red tape and change of laws (whereas Amazon has an army of lawyers to find loopholes, and waste time in the courts and not change a thing).

This will stop small business growth and eliminate Amazon’s competition, further cementing the monopoly.

SCB

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Yeah I'm all about regs, but the idea Amazon somehow stifles small business is shaky at best

Pika

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Yeah I see no way this happens, if they wouldn't involve themselves in Microsoft being a monopoly /anticompetitive they sure as hell ain't going to combat Amazon

sin_free_for_00_days

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Wasn't Microsoft convicted of being a monopoly though? I mean, it was overturned, but they did something.