10 ms·

Amazon Is Trying to Control the Underlying Infrastructure of Our Economy

181 points by dsr12 9y ago

nannal 9y ago
https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1498341777756-shutterstock_445202842-copy.jpeg?resize=1050:* https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1498341777756-s... What the ever loving christ is this image? "Jason Koebler" ought to be formally introduced to photoshop as at the minute he is a danger to the eye.
- Animats 9y ago
  Maybe they have a program which generates vaguely relevant images automatically. Further down, in an article about pythons, the snake, the publishing system inserts a plug for an article about Python, the language.
  - wildrhythms 9y ago
    I don't think so; the image is captioned: >Image: Shutterstock/remix Jason Koebler Jason Koebler is a VICE contributor: https://motherboard.vice.com/es/contributor/jason-koebler https://motherboard.vice.com/es/contributor/jason-koebler
- jolux 9y ago
  It's Vice, I think it's meant to be terrible.
gokubi 9y ago
I agree with the article, but Amazon is more monopsony than monopoly. AMZN is like Walmart--they're the buyer producers must sell to in order to get to the consumer. They control access to the market. And as we've seen with Walmart, monopsony power can be very destructive to producers. Great fast company article on Walmart's monopsony power: https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart
- stale2002 9y ago
  I know right, isn't it awesome? Low low prices! Customers customers customers. The only people who get screwed are the businesses.
- maxharris 9y ago
  So why not make a competing company? Just tell people that if they shop from you, they won't get the excellent speed, service and low prices they've come to expect from Amazon, but that they will benefit in other ways, somehow. If you can't explain what those benefits are well enough to convince people to freely choose to buy from your company instead, you are not helping to make the world a better place. If you advocate running to the government to get them to smack down others who are more successful, you're just limiting choice, and that makes you part of the problem. (Assuming that you agree that the point of technology is to make lives easier, longer, more enjoyable, etc.) Notice what Jobs did with regarding the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit stuff. He was very careful not to let all that groupthink pile on and rule his mind. Instead of joining in with all that sour grapes stuff, he focused on creating the future instead.
  - chii 9y ago
    If the company achieved their success via externality of various costs that their competitor is unable or unwilling to, then you'd have an unfair market. This is where govt needs to step in.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      All that matters is the result. Does X cause prices to be low or prices to be high. I do not care about "unfair". What I care about is consumers. And consumer welfare. Unless what you are describing helps consumers in a specific, measurable way, ex by lowering prices, then it is harmful.
      - chii 9y ago
        if walmart is allowed to pay such a low wage to their workers that they have to be on food stamps, is it still "fair" to society? They surely gain more customers that way, but at the cost of tax payers - mum and dad corner stores or small groceries that don't pay such low wages can't compete.
LyalinDotCom 9y ago
"Last year, Amazon captured nearly $1 of every $2 Americans spent online. As recently as 2015, most people looking to buy something online started at a search engine. Today, a majority go straight to Amazon." You know all those scifi movies where corporations in the future are the government in space and have giant armies and space ships? Well at this rate I am betting one of those solar empires will have "Amazon" on its flag. In all seriousness though, people need to take the rise of companies like amazon and really think hard what we are loosing by enabling them to take over our lives. This is not a rant against corporations though, or even Amazon or the great people that work there, but its more about what we as a society allow.
- devoply 9y ago
  > people need to take the rise of companies like amazon and really think hard Consumers don't think, they consume. Much like zombies. If you want consciousness in the system that has to come from gasp government. But that would be against what we all stand for. And it will continue to win until there is some major paradigm change. It has nothing to do with any choices, and everything to do with consumer and corporate behavior.
  - _red 9y ago
    >Consumers don't think, they consume. Much like zombies. Nearly every part of that statement is false. >If you want consciousness in the system that has to come from gasp government. So, the masses are too stupid to know where to buy toilet-paper, but they are intelligent enough to elect the right politicians whom will enforce the right regulations?
    - nefitty 9y ago
      I avoid the cognitive dissonance of consumption by explicitly not thinking of the environmental and societal impact my purchases make. What is false about the statement, "consumer's don't think, they consume"?
      - 9y ago
madez 9y ago
I don't think amazon has an interest in that, because it will lead governments to make amazons life uneasy, and they are capable of making it very uneasy.
martin1975 9y ago
I comparison shop - and while Amazon often beats other retailers in price due to Prime, it's not not always the case. Most times, unless Amazon stocks the item, the price of shipping is padded into the Prime cost compared to another retailer. I smell an opportunity for google here to eject some kind of a price search engine that maes it eas/y/ier for us to find products ... That's usually what it comes down to anyway, once you know what you want to get.
- sogen 9y ago
  It's already in there, in the Shop tab.
  - calvano915 9y ago
    Yes, known in the good ol' days as http://froogle.com http://froogle.com which I still use :)
TimSchumann 9y ago
*succeeding at controlling FTFY
intopieces 9y ago
FTA >Ask Alexa to send you batteries and you won't get the option of Duracell or Energizer; you'll be shipped Amazon-branded batteries. Amazon favors its own in-house products the same way Wal-Mart, Target and Costco put their private label brands in more effective places than their competitors. In any case, if you tell her you don't want those, she will list competitors after.
- abrkn 9y ago
  I don't care which battery brand I use. The Amazon Basics brand is cheap. The packaging is subtle and minimal. Oh, and I can have them delivered in an hour! Duracell on the other hand... They've been showing me ads on Twitter for months, probably because I googled "2032 vs 2025 battery"
0xFFC 9y ago
I am very curious how Walmart will fight back. As we all know Walmart is the biggest company in the world. Their board is consist of famous politicians who have powers. They will fight back with Amazon as hard as they can.
- maxharris 9y ago
  Their board is consist of famous politicians who have powers. This is exactly what a just government should stop. The winner should rise up via their economic prowess (i.e., their ability to provide a better/cheaper/lighter/denser good or service that improves human life). NOT their political power (i.e., lobbying for regulations to kneecap an innovative competitor). What hangs in the balance is your access to a better life. Words cannot describe how much better life is when you don't have to babysit physical servers, drive to the mall to buy a pair of jeans, drive to the grocery store to get things like food and soap, etc. If you don't speak up and root for the innovators - those that make long bets when everyone else is against them - you are doing nothing more than shutting down your own future. (It is not an inevitability that achievement is rewarded. There are periods in history and in other cultures where this does not occur! Thus it is a mistake to take wealth and technology for granted - it didn't always exist, and it may not exist in the future. Especially if those that take great risks to drive humanity forward are mercilessly swatted down by lesser minds.) Amazon is a company that made several such long bets. Exhibit A: an article, entitled "Can Amazon Survive?" from 1999: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/can-amazon-survive/ http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/can-amazon-surviv... Exhibit B: "Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet," wherein Bloomberg heaped nothing but doubt on AWS when it first came out: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-11-12/jeff-bezos-risky-bet https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-11-12/jeff-bezo...
adventured 9y ago
Wait, I thought Microsoft already took over the US economy, creating a toll-road by dominating the Internet? http://i.imgur.com/CfaOAxF.jpg http://i.imgur.com/CfaOAxF.jpg http://i.imgur.com/ZEMkiPk.jpg http://i.imgur.com/ZEMkiPk.jpg Oh right, this isn't 1997, Amazon is the new new fear monster click-bait machine. Bezos is the new new world's richest (soon to be). And Amazon is going to rule everything! You know, or, it turns out the US economy is so massive that it takes so long to conquer any given big corner of it, that long before that happens the all-critical founder retires or dies, and whatever big conglomerate one happens to be speaking of at that time (whether Sears or Walmart or Alcoa or IBM or American Tobacco or GM) then goes into erosion or stagnation as competitors/government/technology change attacks it.
WalterBright 9y ago
The irony is I don't hear much anymore about the unstoppable Walmart juggernaut destroying the retail businesses of America.
- wmeredith 9y ago
  Then you haven't been listening. It's old news. Wal-Mart utterly destroyed the majority of main streets across rural America decades ago.
chrismealy 9y ago
The centrally-planned rational economy of the future is emerging from a few blocks in downtown Seattle.
shmerl 9y ago
Shouldn't anti-trust address this?
- Finnucane 9y ago
  Yeah, Jeff Sessions is gonna get right on that.
warmfuzzykitten 9y ago
"Last year, Amazon captured nearly $1 of every $2 Americans spent online." Actually, 43%. Online sales were 11.7% of US retail. So Amazon is taking over the country with a whopping 5% of total retail. Buy hey, got you to click on it and upvote it.

181 points by dsr12 9y ago

https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1498341777756-shutterstock_445202842-copy.jpeg?resize=1050:* https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1498341777756-s... What the ever loving christ is this image? "Jason Koebler" ought to be formally introduced to photoshop as at the minute he is a danger to the eye.

Animats 9y ago
Maybe they have a program which generates vaguely relevant images automatically. Further down, in an article about pythons, the snake, the publishing system inserts a plug for an article about Python, the language.
- wildrhythms 9y ago
  I don't think so; the image is captioned: >Image: Shutterstock/remix Jason Koebler Jason Koebler is a VICE contributor: https://motherboard.vice.com/es/contributor/jason-koebler https://motherboard.vice.com/es/contributor/jason-koebler
jolux 9y ago
It's Vice, I think it's meant to be terrible.

gokubi 9y ago

I agree with the article, but Amazon is more monopsony than monopoly. AMZN is like Walmart--they're the buyer producers must sell to in order to get to the consumer. They control access to the market. And as we've seen with Walmart, monopsony power can be very destructive to producers. Great fast company article on Walmart's monopsony power: https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart

stale2002 9y ago
I know right, isn't it awesome? Low low prices! Customers customers customers. The only people who get screwed are the businesses.
maxharris 9y ago
So why not make a competing company? Just tell people that if they shop from you, they won't get the excellent speed, service and low prices they've come to expect from Amazon, but that they will benefit in other ways, somehow. If you can't explain what those benefits are well enough to convince people to freely choose to buy from your company instead, you are not helping to make the world a better place. If you advocate running to the government to get them to smack down others who are more successful, you're just limiting choice, and that makes you part of the problem. (Assuming that you agree that the point of technology is to make lives easier, longer, more enjoyable, etc.) Notice what Jobs did with regarding the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit stuff. He was very careful not to let all that groupthink pile on and rule his mind. Instead of joining in with all that sour grapes stuff, he focused on creating the future instead.
- chii 9y ago
  If the company achieved their success via externality of various costs that their competitor is unable or unwilling to, then you'd have an unfair market. This is where govt needs to step in.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    All that matters is the result. Does X cause prices to be low or prices to be high. I do not care about "unfair". What I care about is consumers. And consumer welfare. Unless what you are describing helps consumers in a specific, measurable way, ex by lowering prices, then it is harmful.
    - chii 9y ago
      if walmart is allowed to pay such a low wage to their workers that they have to be on food stamps, is it still "fair" to society? They surely gain more customers that way, but at the cost of tax payers - mum and dad corner stores or small groceries that don't pay such low wages can't compete.

LyalinDotCom 9y ago

"Last year, Amazon captured nearly $1 of every $2 Americans spent online. As recently as 2015, most people looking to buy something online started at a search engine. Today, a majority go straight to Amazon." You know all those scifi movies where corporations in the future are the government in space and have giant armies and space ships? Well at this rate I am betting one of those solar empires will have "Amazon" on its flag. In all seriousness though, people need to take the rise of companies like amazon and really think hard what we are loosing by enabling them to take over our lives. This is not a rant against corporations though, or even Amazon or the great people that work there, but its more about what we as a society allow.

devoply 9y ago
> people need to take the rise of companies like amazon and really think hard Consumers don't think, they consume. Much like zombies. If you want consciousness in the system that has to come from gasp government. But that would be against what we all stand for. And it will continue to win until there is some major paradigm change. It has nothing to do with any choices, and everything to do with consumer and corporate behavior.
- _red 9y ago
  >Consumers don't think, they consume. Much like zombies. Nearly every part of that statement is false. >If you want consciousness in the system that has to come from gasp government. So, the masses are too stupid to know where to buy toilet-paper, but they are intelligent enough to elect the right politicians whom will enforce the right regulations?
  - nefitty 9y ago
    I avoid the cognitive dissonance of consumption by explicitly not thinking of the environmental and societal impact my purchases make. What is false about the statement, "consumer's don't think, they consume"?
    - 9y ago

madez 9y ago

I don't think amazon has an interest in that, because it will lead governments to make amazons life uneasy, and they are capable of making it very uneasy.

martin1975 9y ago

I comparison shop - and while Amazon often beats other retailers in price due to Prime, it's not not always the case. Most times, unless Amazon stocks the item, the price of shipping is padded into the Prime cost compared to another retailer. I smell an opportunity for google here to eject some kind of a price search engine that maes it eas/y/ier for us to find products ... That's usually what it comes down to anyway, once you know what you want to get.

sogen 9y ago
It's already in there, in the Shop tab.
- calvano915 9y ago
  Yes, known in the good ol' days as http://froogle.com http://froogle.com which I still use :)

TimSchumann 9y ago

*succeeding at controlling FTFY

intopieces 9y ago

FTA >Ask Alexa to send you batteries and you won't get the option of Duracell or Energizer; you'll be shipped Amazon-branded batteries. Amazon favors its own in-house products the same way Wal-Mart, Target and Costco put their private label brands in more effective places than their competitors. In any case, if you tell her you don't want those, she will list competitors after.

abrkn 9y ago
I don't care which battery brand I use. The Amazon Basics brand is cheap. The packaging is subtle and minimal. Oh, and I can have them delivered in an hour! Duracell on the other hand... They've been showing me ads on Twitter for months, probably because I googled "2032 vs 2025 battery"

0xFFC 9y ago

I am very curious how Walmart will fight back. As we all know Walmart is the biggest company in the world. Their board is consist of famous politicians who have powers. They will fight back with Amazon as hard as they can.

maxharris 9y ago
Their board is consist of famous politicians who have powers. This is exactly what a just government should stop. The winner should rise up via their economic prowess (i.e., their ability to provide a better/cheaper/lighter/denser good or service that improves human life). NOT their political power (i.e., lobbying for regulations to kneecap an innovative competitor). What hangs in the balance is your access to a better life. Words cannot describe how much better life is when you don't have to babysit physical servers, drive to the mall to buy a pair of jeans, drive to the grocery store to get things like food and soap, etc. If you don't speak up and root for the innovators - those that make long bets when everyone else is against them - you are doing nothing more than shutting down your own future. (It is not an inevitability that achievement is rewarded. There are periods in history and in other cultures where this does not occur! Thus it is a mistake to take wealth and technology for granted - it didn't always exist, and it may not exist in the future. Especially if those that take great risks to drive humanity forward are mercilessly swatted down by lesser minds.) Amazon is a company that made several such long bets. Exhibit A: an article, entitled "Can Amazon Survive?" from 1999: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/can-amazon-survive/ http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/can-amazon-surviv... Exhibit B: "Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet," wherein Bloomberg heaped nothing but doubt on AWS when it first came out: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-11-12/jeff-bezos-risky-bet https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-11-12/jeff-bezo...

adventured 9y ago

Wait, I thought Microsoft already took over the US economy, creating a toll-road by dominating the Internet? http://i.imgur.com/CfaOAxF.jpg http://i.imgur.com/CfaOAxF.jpg http://i.imgur.com/ZEMkiPk.jpg http://i.imgur.com/ZEMkiPk.jpg Oh right, this isn't 1997, Amazon is the new new fear monster click-bait machine. Bezos is the new new world's richest (soon to be). And Amazon is going to rule everything! You know, or, it turns out the US economy is so massive that it takes so long to conquer any given big corner of it, that long before that happens the all-critical founder retires or dies, and whatever big conglomerate one happens to be speaking of at that time (whether Sears or Walmart or Alcoa or IBM or American Tobacco or GM) then goes into erosion or stagnation as competitors/government/technology change attacks it.

WalterBright 9y ago

The irony is I don't hear much anymore about the unstoppable Walmart juggernaut destroying the retail businesses of America.

wmeredith 9y ago
Then you haven't been listening. It's old news. Wal-Mart utterly destroyed the majority of main streets across rural America decades ago.

chrismealy 9y ago

The centrally-planned rational economy of the future is emerging from a few blocks in downtown Seattle.

shmerl 9y ago

Shouldn't anti-trust address this?

Finnucane 9y ago
Yeah, Jeff Sessions is gonna get right on that.

warmfuzzykitten 9y ago

"Last year, Amazon captured nearly $1 of every $2 Americans spent online." Actually, 43%. Online sales were 11.7% of US retail. So Amazon is taking over the country with a whopping 5% of total retail. Buy hey, got you to click on it and upvote it.