6 ms·

Amazon’s Antitrust Antagonist Has a Breakthrough Idea

123 points by wglb 8y ago

evantahler 8y ago
While reading this article, I was presented for an ad for AWS. Checkmate.
- johneth 8y ago
  How is that a checkmate?
- iamdave 8y ago
  I'm going to shamelessly hijack this question to pose something that came to mind reading this, and the more abridged exploratory linked by another commentor (https://qz.com/282971/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-amazon/ https://qz.com/282971/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-ama... for the interested), since AWS was mentioned. I propose a thought experiment: Supposing government takes Kahn up on this modest proposal and starts levying real regulatory eyeballs on Amazon and actually end up with something on the House floor. Asking the HN crowd: how do you think this would even affect AWS as a product and would it have any sort of ripple effects to the industries and working engineers that rely on it?
IBM 8y ago
Lina Khan is a rising superstar in antitrust/policy circles and the next Democrat in the White House should appoint her to the Supreme Court so she can start to undo Bork's Chicago School influence on antitrust doctrine. https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017/the-democrats-confront-monopoly/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017...
1123581321 8y ago
Sincere question: when I read this article, it had this sentence: “Unwilling or perhaps unable to accept that a woman wrote a breakthrough legal text, they keep talking about bearded dudes.” Is “dudes” acceptable in NYT’s style guide now? The term seemed incongruous either way. To reiterate, I am only asking about the term “dudes” and only quoted the whole sentence for context.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Also, is there any indication that anyone has problems with the paper because it was published by a woman?
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  That whole sentence seemed downright offensive and incongruous to me. Nowhere in the article was any evidence presented that objection to her ideas was based on her gender. But still the author feels the need to project that belief by demeaning the words of men as "bearded dudes". When we come to a point where one group of people is not allowed to critique the ideas of another group of people because it is socially acceptable to demean those critics based on their gender makes me think we're doing something wrong. Edit: For people that downvoted me, or a lot of the other comments about this sentence, I would like to know why.
- crazygringo 8y ago
  I also thought it was an incongruous/bizarre sentence (what men are they even referring to?), because the context isn't explained until much further down. But then it does make sense -- it refers explicitly to this cover [1] and the content within ("Battle of the Beards"), where "bearded dude" really does feel like an appropriate description. So I'd call it bad article organization but not a style problem. [1] https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/AC_APRIL.pdf https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/wp-content/up...
  - 1123581321 8y ago
    I saw that. I understand use of the word bearded, given the cover, if not the authors (a woman, a bearded man and a clean-shaven man.) I am specifically wondering about the NYT allowing the word “dudes” since it seems to be used as slang for men and not as a term necessary to describe the criticism.
    - hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
      I, like some other commenters, objected to that sentence, but now after understanding the context about the linked article further down I think I get it now, and I agree I hope it's just how some reorganization during editing that made its meaning confusing. I think "bearded dudes" is used specifically because the article was named "Hipster Antitrust", i.e. "dudes" being used to highlight the way the word "hipster" was used to ridicule Lina Khan's ideas in the first place.
whatshisface 8y ago
>* Unwilling or perhaps unable to accept that a woman wrote a breakthrough legal text, they keep talking about bearded dudes.* I wish they would leave these comments out. If they wanted to protray the opposition, they could have printed some of their arguments. Maye the accusation is true but you can't just make accusations and move on. It's not something that should be treated that lightly...
mitchs 8y ago
> She has her own critics now: Several leading scholars have found fault with Ms. Khan’s proposals to revive and expand antitrust, and some have tried to dismiss her paper with the mocking label “Hipster Antitrust.” Unwilling or perhaps unable to accept that a woman wrote a breakthrough legal text, they keep talking about bearded dudes. So we are just presuming sexism? OK David Streitfeld, I immediately trust you and believe that all critics of her paper are evil dudes who just hate women. Oh look, we are moving on from that point immediately to dive into her back story and not backing it up with anything. Guess I'll just have to take your word for it that her critics disagreed with her instead of her work.
- mitchs 8y ago
  Well, three quarters of the way through the article we got our answer. > The April issue of the journal Antitrust Chronicle, edited by Mr. Medvedovsky, features a drawing of a bearded man on the cover right above the words “Hipster Antitrust.” In the middle of an ... there’s a photograph of a bearded man taking a selfie next to the chapter heading “Battle of the Beards.” It is perhaps relevant that only one of the 12 authors or experts in the issue is female. > The Hipster issue was sponsored by Facebook, another sign that Big Tech is striving to shape the monopoly-law debate. The company declined to comment. Interesting. I'm annoyed that the article moved on well enough for me to come post a comment on the comment that stuck out like a sore thumb.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    That explains the beard but what about the accusation of sexism? >It is perhaps relevant that only one of the 12 authors or experts in the issue is female. Hopefully that's not all that was said in support of it.
    - prepend 8y ago
      It must be sexism because 11/12 authors were male. Obviously. If you disagree, you are sexist. Also, my cat is sexist because she had five kittens and all five are male. I don’t like discounting ideas because of the flaws of their originators, but I’m likely going to ignore all articles that make such spurious claims without evidence.
Invictus0 8y ago
The NYT's editorializing is tiresome and distracting. Why the need to mention her husband several times, and the unfounded allegation that she found opponents because of her gender, and the "bearded dudes" reference. I applaud Khan for starting this conversation, but I'm worried about misguided legislation on these antitrust issues. Internet centralization is inevitable and unstoppable, and regulations are likely to hurt competitors (in the form of increased startup costs) more than the incumbents.
- DenisM 8y ago
  Your arguments word for wordcoud be applied to breakup of ATT, and yet it proved to be a great idea.
nabla9 8y ago
Here is shorter article describing the issue for a general audience written by Lina Khan herself https://qz.com/282971/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-amazon/ https://qz.com/282971/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-ama...
- dangjc 8y ago
  This was a great article. I like how she highlights how predatory pricing and cross business subsidization used to be considered wrong and it was a shift in the courts that changed that.
- tfehring 8y ago
  Thanks for posting this - much more informative than the originally posted article. Khan seems to be arguing that Amazon has two types of monopoly power - horizontal monopoly power in specific sectors, e.g. books, and vertical monopoly power in ecommerce. I agree that the first type should probably be more heavily regulated, though there's room for debate as to the appropriate level of granularity. (Should regulators look at Amazon's market share for books? Ebooks? Textbooks? Educational material? Entertainment?) But as for the second type, I'm not convinced that there are strong economic arguments in favor of regulating vertical monopolies as long as the monopolist doesn't have horizontal monopoly power at any level of the supply chain. After all, as long as there's no horizontal monopoly power, competitors are free to vertically integrate themselves through M&A or organic expansion if the benefits of vertical integration are that significant. Of course, it's possible that AWS should be regulated as a horizontal monopoly in the IaaS space based on its nearly 50% market share. But IMO, any such regulation should only impact AWS (and any other areas in which Amaon has horizontal monopolies), not Amazon as a whole.
mrep 8y ago
That was a lot of words for very little content. I still don't really know what this breakthrough idea is but I do know way more than I need to know about Lina Khan. The only 2 paragraphs that allude to it are: In Ms. Khan’s view, a company like Amazon — one that sells things, competes against others selling things, and owns the platform where the deals are done — has an inherent advantage that undermines fair competition. From Amazon’s point of view, however, it is a problem indeed that Ms. Khan concludes in the Yale paper that regulating parts of the company like a utility “could make sense.” She also said it “could make sense” to treat Amazon’s e-commerce operation like a bridge, highway, port, power grid or telephone network — all of which are required to allow access to their infrastructure on a nondiscriminatory basis.
- IBM 8y ago
  This is a profile of a person who has sparked a revival of antitrust in America. If you want to read the actual paper she wrote, which is linked to in the article, you should do that. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...
  - mrep 8y ago
    Well then they should have titled it something like "Lina Khan, Amazon’s Antitrust Antagonist" and not "Amazon’s Antitrust Antagonist Has a Breakthrough Idea". I expected to actually read and learn about her ideas.
    - dchichkov 8y ago
      If you want to learn about the breakthrough idea, you can read the actual paper she wrote, which is linked to the article.
      - prepend 8y ago
        Isn’t the purpose of journalism to inform on these ideas. I assume there is no idea if the Times did an in depth piece without describing the idea. This is because the Times is well resourced and basically competent enough to not fuck up the point of a story. If I read the paper and find the great idea not in the article then that makes me think the author of the article is not so good.
wonder_er 8y ago
Why all the energy on Amazon when the organization we'd expect to break up the monopoly _is an actual monopoly_ in so many ways? If we ask the government to break up Amazon, should we expect it to break up the post office? Amazon already may be in the decline - myself and many of my peers no longer trust it to deliver items we purchase. They have a big Fake Review problem [0] and there's competitors popping up all over the place. [0] https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124 https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124
- laughingman2 8y ago
  Well, the difference is the "actual monopoly" here can be voted out democratically. Give the workers of Amazon and other companies the same power to influence the board through one person one vote or a liquid democracy, then we can talk about the supposed hypocrisy involved in asking government to break up monopolies.
  - wonder_er 8y ago
    But we can stop voting for the thing by... not buying it. If enough people stop using Amazon, Amazon goes away. Now think of how large the demonstrations have been to protest various government policies, and how little change has come about. I've not yet been able to figure out how to vote out drug warriors, and whoever the hell it is in the government that supports the US global military empire. If you can tell me who to vote for to legalize drugs and end the wars, I'll do so in a heartbeat! I think the government would like us to continue to think that we have say in its going-ons, via once-every-two-year elections.
- protomyth 8y ago
  The government is actually required to create a Post Office in the US Constitution Article I, Section 8, Clause 7. I would imagine a monopoly argument would be not get by the courts.
gniv 8y ago
I thought the A&P story in particular was peculiar, since they presented it as an argument for not regulating Amazon, but looking more carefully into its history (on Wikipedia), I would say what happened to A&P was probably beneficial to consumers long-term. So if FTC looks at how the government handled A&P in the 40s and uses that as a model for dealing with Amazon, I would say it's not necessarily a bad thing.
cliffordthedog 8y ago
> Don’t let the government pursue Amazon the way it pursued A.&P., Mr. Muris and Mr. Nuechterlein warned. why, because Amazon is so precious?
jondubois 8y ago
>> “As consumers, as users, we love these tech companies,” Ms. Khan said. “But as citizens, as workers, and as entrepreneurs, we recognize that their power is troubling. We need a new framework, a new vocabulary for how to assess and address their dominance.” That's a good point; governments have to face the fact that people aren't just consumers but also producers. In fact, based on how much time people spend working each week, it's fair to say that people are more producers than they are consumers. If this is the case, then surely the government should take steps to protect people from monopolies.
Eridrus 8y ago
I wonder if there is any good writing on how any potential regulation would play out. Amazon is already a platform, so what about it would actually be changed if it was "treated like infrastructure"? Ok, players like Google who have been blackballed could list there, so that's a small win. Would it also mean restricting Amazon business units from seeing data on their platform? I'm not sure that's actually a win for society. Is it forcing Amazon to share this data with competitors? That would be interesting, but starts running into privacy challenges. Is it enforcing some idea of neutrality in ranking items? That seems a very hard thing to regulate well without destroying the utility of search. As part of the EU Anti-trust ruling against Google Shopping, Google has made Shopping into a fully separate (accounting wise) business unit and opened up shopping ad slates for bidding to competing sites, but the sites who instigated that action aren't happy because they are not actually able to monetise those slots as effectively as Google can. These companies are powerful, and maybe regulating based on price is short sited as the article claims, but a long term view should not seek to destroy power for no other reason than it exists.
- avar 8y ago
  "Treated like infrastructure" is a soft version of completely breaking up the company. I.e. just like your power company can't deny you services on the basis that you compete with them Amazon couldn't deny Google a place on their platform. Other Amazon business units could still buy data from the platform, but they'd need to make that available to external companies too. Nobody's trying to "destroy power for no other reason than it exists". There's plenty of established powerful companies in e.g. the car industry, telecom etc. where the rules of what counts as anti-trust are thoroughly established. Tech companies of this scale are a really young industry, so this is still all being figured out, and it's no surprise given the lack of precedent and their relative power that tech companies are in the spotlight when it comes to regulation.
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    If we are talking about Amazon-the-Marketplace and not Amazon-the-Giant-Company I'm not sure I would call that a tech company. Sure, they sell their products using a website, but their core business is sales, warehousing and order fulfillment. It's a fairly traditional business, brought to bigger scale and executed really well. Sure, Technology plays a large part in achieving scale (printed cataloges couldn't fit what they offer), but we don't call Airbus a Tech company either.
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 8y ago
For those wondering about the 'bearded hipster' comment, it's specifically referring to this: https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/antitrust-chronicle-hipster-antitrust/ https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/antitrust-chr... This is written later in the article.
keelhaule 8y ago
Scholarly sugar coating, what about the monopoly of other industries such as "printing the dollar". Amazon is just competing, it didn't usurp power, or conquer a foreign land.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
wrong_variable 8y ago
Does Linus hold a monopoly over operating systems since maybe 80% of servers and mobile phones use Linux ? Maybe he twirls his mustache every night thinking about how much cash he will make once he aggressively starts charging everybody 100 dollars to upgrade their Linux version, and all he has been doing over the past 20 years is under price until he has absolute vertical domination ? Linux harms legitimate 'small business' owners who cannot sell their operating system for 10,000 dollar / license to recoup their investment. --- BIG RED /S --- Lawyers trying to create laws about macro economics is no different than me telling a doctor how to perform eye surgery, it's what got us into this mess. So if Amazon has a monopoly, and you think that is bad why not put you money where your mouth is and aggressively fund its competitors ? Where were you when for 20+ years shareholders of amazon were funding it's growth, taking all the risk, most amazon investors have not seen any actual cash from their investment, if tomorrow amazon makes a bad decision or mistake, then all the unrealized capital gains wealth that is it's stock price would plummet. You could solve this anti-trust issue really easily you know ? China has alternate e-commerce sites, so does India, instead of the populist message of "Eat Bezos" maybe give some of your salary to actually solve the problem ? I know amazon shareholders did, and they didn't have our hindsight. Of course I am not going to take their talk seriously unless they actually buy shares in Amazon's competitors, ask the EU how the shakedown of tech companies is helping them, they could seize all of Bezo's, Zuck's, Sergey's wealth (which is in stocks anyway, how much would it be worth after nationalization ?) and still not figure out how to solve the problem.
SCAQTony 8y ago
Never once was a de facto antitrust law mentioned that Amazon had violated. Plenty of talk regarding how antitrust laws are weak how they they could apply to Amazon by way of their ability to undercut competitors but that does not really "wash" since 53% of Amazon is third party sellers: https://www.statista.com/statistics/259782/third-party-seller-share-of-amazon-platform/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/259782/third-party-selle... Ultimately Being a monopoly is not against the law if the company avoided exclusionary or predatory acts.
- int_19h 8y ago
  The whole point of the article is that the definitions of monopoly abuse that underpin our existing laws are not broad enough.
efa 8y ago
As a novice, it seems extremely difficult to define what's too big. Her argument is that Amazon owns the platform where the deals are done and thus has an inherent advantage that undermines fair competition. Any established company has an inherent advantage over those just entering the market. They have market share, infrastructure, marketing, and so on. Amazon has a platform but of course anyone can sell through other channels. It's just a matter (of course a non-trivial one) of gaining traction. Personally I think Amazon is way too dominate, but I just don't know how you codify what line they've crossed. Maybe it's like the old porn definition - "I know it when I see it."
econ4all 8y ago
Of course the NYT would publish a 1k word profile of a nobody as long as they're criticizing big bad tech companies. Tech companies are only an issue for the newspaper business model they are a boon for the economy as a whole.
ihatethem 8y ago
Of course the NYT would publish a 1k word profile of a virtual nobody as long as they're criticizing big bad tech companies. Tech companies are only an issue for the newspaper business, they are a boon for the economy as a whole.

123 points by wglb 8y ago

evantahler 8y ago

While reading this article, I was presented for an ad for AWS. Checkmate.

johneth 8y ago
How is that a checkmate?
iamdave 8y ago
I'm going to shamelessly hijack this question to pose something that came to mind reading this, and the more abridged exploratory linked by another commentor (https://qz.com/282971/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-amazon/ https://qz.com/282971/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-ama... for the interested), since AWS was mentioned. I propose a thought experiment: Supposing government takes Kahn up on this modest proposal and starts levying real regulatory eyeballs on Amazon and actually end up with something on the House floor. Asking the HN crowd: how do you think this would even affect AWS as a product and would it have any sort of ripple effects to the industries and working engineers that rely on it?

IBM 8y ago

Lina Khan is a rising superstar in antitrust/policy circles and the next Democrat in the White House should appoint her to the Supreme Court so she can start to undo Bork's Chicago School influence on antitrust doctrine. https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017/the-democrats-confront-monopoly/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017...

1123581321 8y ago

Sincere question: when I read this article, it had this sentence: “Unwilling or perhaps unable to accept that a woman wrote a breakthrough legal text, they keep talking about bearded dudes.” Is “dudes” acceptable in NYT’s style guide now? The term seemed incongruous either way. To reiterate, I am only asking about the term “dudes” and only quoted the whole sentence for context.

oh_sigh 8y ago
Also, is there any indication that anyone has problems with the paper because it was published by a woman?
hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
That whole sentence seemed downright offensive and incongruous to me. Nowhere in the article was any evidence presented that objection to her ideas was based on her gender. But still the author feels the need to project that belief by demeaning the words of men as "bearded dudes". When we come to a point where one group of people is not allowed to critique the ideas of another group of people because it is socially acceptable to demean those critics based on their gender makes me think we're doing something wrong. Edit: For people that downvoted me, or a lot of the other comments about this sentence, I would like to know why.
crazygringo 8y ago
I also thought it was an incongruous/bizarre sentence (what men are they even referring to?), because the context isn't explained until much further down. But then it does make sense -- it refers explicitly to this cover [1] and the content within ("Battle of the Beards"), where "bearded dude" really does feel like an appropriate description. So I'd call it bad article organization but not a style problem. [1] https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/AC_APRIL.pdf https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/wp-content/up...
- 1123581321 8y ago
  I saw that. I understand use of the word bearded, given the cover, if not the authors (a woman, a bearded man and a clean-shaven man.) I am specifically wondering about the NYT allowing the word “dudes” since it seems to be used as slang for men and not as a term necessary to describe the criticism.
  - hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
    I, like some other commenters, objected to that sentence, but now after understanding the context about the linked article further down I think I get it now, and I agree I hope it's just how some reorganization during editing that made its meaning confusing. I think "bearded dudes" is used specifically because the article was named "Hipster Antitrust", i.e. "dudes" being used to highlight the way the word "hipster" was used to ridicule Lina Khan's ideas in the first place.

whatshisface 8y ago

>* Unwilling or perhaps unable to accept that a woman wrote a breakthrough legal text, they keep talking about bearded dudes.* I wish they would leave these comments out. If they wanted to protray the opposition, they could have printed some of their arguments. Maye the accusation is true but you can't just make accusations and move on. It's not something that should be treated that lightly...

mitchs 8y ago

> She has her own critics now: Several leading scholars have found fault with Ms. Khan’s proposals to revive and expand antitrust, and some have tried to dismiss her paper with the mocking label “Hipster Antitrust.” Unwilling or perhaps unable to accept that a woman wrote a breakthrough legal text, they keep talking about bearded dudes. So we are just presuming sexism? OK David Streitfeld, I immediately trust you and believe that all critics of her paper are evil dudes who just hate women. Oh look, we are moving on from that point immediately to dive into her back story and not backing it up with anything. Guess I'll just have to take your word for it that her critics disagreed with her instead of her work.

mitchs 8y ago
Well, three quarters of the way through the article we got our answer. > The April issue of the journal Antitrust Chronicle, edited by Mr. Medvedovsky, features a drawing of a bearded man on the cover right above the words “Hipster Antitrust.” In the middle of an ... there’s a photograph of a bearded man taking a selfie next to the chapter heading “Battle of the Beards.” It is perhaps relevant that only one of the 12 authors or experts in the issue is female. > The Hipster issue was sponsored by Facebook, another sign that Big Tech is striving to shape the monopoly-law debate. The company declined to comment. Interesting. I'm annoyed that the article moved on well enough for me to come post a comment on the comment that stuck out like a sore thumb.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  That explains the beard but what about the accusation of sexism? >It is perhaps relevant that only one of the 12 authors or experts in the issue is female. Hopefully that's not all that was said in support of it.
  - prepend 8y ago
    It must be sexism because 11/12 authors were male. Obviously. If you disagree, you are sexist. Also, my cat is sexist because she had five kittens and all five are male. I don’t like discounting ideas because of the flaws of their originators, but I’m likely going to ignore all articles that make such spurious claims without evidence.

Invictus0 8y ago

The NYT's editorializing is tiresome and distracting. Why the need to mention her husband several times, and the unfounded allegation that she found opponents because of her gender, and the "bearded dudes" reference. I applaud Khan for starting this conversation, but I'm worried about misguided legislation on these antitrust issues. Internet centralization is inevitable and unstoppable, and regulations are likely to hurt competitors (in the form of increased startup costs) more than the incumbents.

DenisM 8y ago
Your arguments word for wordcoud be applied to breakup of ATT, and yet it proved to be a great idea.

nabla9 8y ago

Here is shorter article describing the issue for a general audience written by Lina Khan herself https://qz.com/282971/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-amazon/ https://qz.com/282971/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-ama...

dangjc 8y ago
This was a great article. I like how she highlights how predatory pricing and cross business subsidization used to be considered wrong and it was a shift in the courts that changed that.
tfehring 8y ago
Thanks for posting this - much more informative than the originally posted article. Khan seems to be arguing that Amazon has two types of monopoly power - horizontal monopoly power in specific sectors, e.g. books, and vertical monopoly power in ecommerce. I agree that the first type should probably be more heavily regulated, though there's room for debate as to the appropriate level of granularity. (Should regulators look at Amazon's market share for books? Ebooks? Textbooks? Educational material? Entertainment?) But as for the second type, I'm not convinced that there are strong economic arguments in favor of regulating vertical monopolies as long as the monopolist doesn't have horizontal monopoly power at any level of the supply chain. After all, as long as there's no horizontal monopoly power, competitors are free to vertically integrate themselves through M&A or organic expansion if the benefits of vertical integration are that significant. Of course, it's possible that AWS should be regulated as a horizontal monopoly in the IaaS space based on its nearly 50% market share. But IMO, any such regulation should only impact AWS (and any other areas in which Amaon has horizontal monopolies), not Amazon as a whole.

mrep 8y ago

That was a lot of words for very little content. I still don't really know what this breakthrough idea is but I do know way more than I need to know about Lina Khan. The only 2 paragraphs that allude to it are: In Ms. Khan’s view, a company like Amazon — one that sells things, competes against others selling things, and owns the platform where the deals are done — has an inherent advantage that undermines fair competition. From Amazon’s point of view, however, it is a problem indeed that Ms. Khan concludes in the Yale paper that regulating parts of the company like a utility “could make sense.” She also said it “could make sense” to treat Amazon’s e-commerce operation like a bridge, highway, port, power grid or telephone network — all of which are required to allow access to their infrastructure on a nondiscriminatory basis.

IBM 8y ago
This is a profile of a person who has sparked a revival of antitrust in America. If you want to read the actual paper she wrote, which is linked to in the article, you should do that. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...
- mrep 8y ago
  Well then they should have titled it something like "Lina Khan, Amazon’s Antitrust Antagonist" and not "Amazon’s Antitrust Antagonist Has a Breakthrough Idea". I expected to actually read and learn about her ideas.
  - dchichkov 8y ago
    If you want to learn about the breakthrough idea, you can read the actual paper she wrote, which is linked to the article.
    - prepend 8y ago
      Isn’t the purpose of journalism to inform on these ideas. I assume there is no idea if the Times did an in depth piece without describing the idea. This is because the Times is well resourced and basically competent enough to not fuck up the point of a story. If I read the paper and find the great idea not in the article then that makes me think the author of the article is not so good.

wonder_er 8y ago

Why all the energy on Amazon when the organization we'd expect to break up the monopoly _is an actual monopoly_ in so many ways? If we ask the government to break up Amazon, should we expect it to break up the post office? Amazon already may be in the decline - myself and many of my peers no longer trust it to deliver items we purchase. They have a big Fake Review problem [0] and there's competitors popping up all over the place. [0] https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124 https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124

laughingman2 8y ago
Well, the difference is the "actual monopoly" here can be voted out democratically. Give the workers of Amazon and other companies the same power to influence the board through one person one vote or a liquid democracy, then we can talk about the supposed hypocrisy involved in asking government to break up monopolies.
- wonder_er 8y ago
  But we can stop voting for the thing by... not buying it. If enough people stop using Amazon, Amazon goes away. Now think of how large the demonstrations have been to protest various government policies, and how little change has come about. I've not yet been able to figure out how to vote out drug warriors, and whoever the hell it is in the government that supports the US global military empire. If you can tell me who to vote for to legalize drugs and end the wars, I'll do so in a heartbeat! I think the government would like us to continue to think that we have say in its going-ons, via once-every-two-year elections.
protomyth 8y ago
The government is actually required to create a Post Office in the US Constitution Article I, Section 8, Clause 7. I would imagine a monopoly argument would be not get by the courts.

gniv 8y ago

I thought the A&P story in particular was peculiar, since they presented it as an argument for not regulating Amazon, but looking more carefully into its history (on Wikipedia), I would say what happened to A&P was probably beneficial to consumers long-term. So if FTC looks at how the government handled A&P in the 40s and uses that as a model for dealing with Amazon, I would say it's not necessarily a bad thing.

cliffordthedog 8y ago

> Don’t let the government pursue Amazon the way it pursued A.&P., Mr. Muris and Mr. Nuechterlein warned. why, because Amazon is so precious?

jondubois 8y ago

>> “As consumers, as users, we love these tech companies,” Ms. Khan said. “But as citizens, as workers, and as entrepreneurs, we recognize that their power is troubling. We need a new framework, a new vocabulary for how to assess and address their dominance.” That's a good point; governments have to face the fact that people aren't just consumers but also producers. In fact, based on how much time people spend working each week, it's fair to say that people are more producers than they are consumers. If this is the case, then surely the government should take steps to protect people from monopolies.

Eridrus 8y ago

I wonder if there is any good writing on how any potential regulation would play out. Amazon is already a platform, so what about it would actually be changed if it was "treated like infrastructure"? Ok, players like Google who have been blackballed could list there, so that's a small win. Would it also mean restricting Amazon business units from seeing data on their platform? I'm not sure that's actually a win for society. Is it forcing Amazon to share this data with competitors? That would be interesting, but starts running into privacy challenges. Is it enforcing some idea of neutrality in ranking items? That seems a very hard thing to regulate well without destroying the utility of search. As part of the EU Anti-trust ruling against Google Shopping, Google has made Shopping into a fully separate (accounting wise) business unit and opened up shopping ad slates for bidding to competing sites, but the sites who instigated that action aren't happy because they are not actually able to monetise those slots as effectively as Google can. These companies are powerful, and maybe regulating based on price is short sited as the article claims, but a long term view should not seek to destroy power for no other reason than it exists.

avar 8y ago
"Treated like infrastructure" is a soft version of completely breaking up the company. I.e. just like your power company can't deny you services on the basis that you compete with them Amazon couldn't deny Google a place on their platform. Other Amazon business units could still buy data from the platform, but they'd need to make that available to external companies too. Nobody's trying to "destroy power for no other reason than it exists". There's plenty of established powerful companies in e.g. the car industry, telecom etc. where the rules of what counts as anti-trust are thoroughly established. Tech companies of this scale are a really young industry, so this is still all being figured out, and it's no surprise given the lack of precedent and their relative power that tech companies are in the spotlight when it comes to regulation.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  If we are talking about Amazon-the-Marketplace and not Amazon-the-Giant-Company I'm not sure I would call that a tech company. Sure, they sell their products using a website, but their core business is sales, warehousing and order fulfillment. It's a fairly traditional business, brought to bigger scale and executed really well. Sure, Technology plays a large part in achieving scale (printed cataloges couldn't fit what they offer), but we don't call Airbus a Tech company either.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi 8y ago

For those wondering about the 'bearded hipster' comment, it's specifically referring to this: https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/antitrust-chronicle-hipster-antitrust/ https://www.competitionpolicyinternational.com/antitrust-chr... This is written later in the article.

keelhaule 8y ago

Scholarly sugar coating, what about the monopoly of other industries such as "printing the dollar". Amazon is just competing, it didn't usurp power, or conquer a foreign land.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

wrong_variable 8y ago

Does Linus hold a monopoly over operating systems since maybe 80% of servers and mobile phones use Linux ? Maybe he twirls his mustache every night thinking about how much cash he will make once he aggressively starts charging everybody 100 dollars to upgrade their Linux version, and all he has been doing over the past 20 years is under price until he has absolute vertical domination ? Linux harms legitimate 'small business' owners who cannot sell their operating system for 10,000 dollar / license to recoup their investment. --- BIG RED /S --- Lawyers trying to create laws about macro economics is no different than me telling a doctor how to perform eye surgery, it's what got us into this mess. So if Amazon has a monopoly, and you think that is bad why not put you money where your mouth is and aggressively fund its competitors ? Where were you when for 20+ years shareholders of amazon were funding it's growth, taking all the risk, most amazon investors have not seen any actual cash from their investment, if tomorrow amazon makes a bad decision or mistake, then all the unrealized capital gains wealth that is it's stock price would plummet. You could solve this anti-trust issue really easily you know ? China has alternate e-commerce sites, so does India, instead of the populist message of "Eat Bezos" maybe give some of your salary to actually solve the problem ? I know amazon shareholders did, and they didn't have our hindsight. Of course I am not going to take their talk seriously unless they actually buy shares in Amazon's competitors, ask the EU how the shakedown of tech companies is helping them, they could seize all of Bezo's, Zuck's, Sergey's wealth (which is in stocks anyway, how much would it be worth after nationalization ?) and still not figure out how to solve the problem.

SCAQTony 8y ago

Never once was a de facto antitrust law mentioned that Amazon had violated. Plenty of talk regarding how antitrust laws are weak how they they could apply to Amazon by way of their ability to undercut competitors but that does not really "wash" since 53% of Amazon is third party sellers: https://www.statista.com/statistics/259782/third-party-seller-share-of-amazon-platform/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/259782/third-party-selle... Ultimately Being a monopoly is not against the law if the company avoided exclusionary or predatory acts.

int_19h 8y ago
The whole point of the article is that the definitions of monopoly abuse that underpin our existing laws are not broad enough.

efa 8y ago

As a novice, it seems extremely difficult to define what's too big. Her argument is that Amazon owns the platform where the deals are done and thus has an inherent advantage that undermines fair competition. Any established company has an inherent advantage over those just entering the market. They have market share, infrastructure, marketing, and so on. Amazon has a platform but of course anyone can sell through other channels. It's just a matter (of course a non-trivial one) of gaining traction. Personally I think Amazon is way too dominate, but I just don't know how you codify what line they've crossed. Maybe it's like the old porn definition - "I know it when I see it."

econ4all 8y ago

Of course the NYT would publish a 1k word profile of a nobody as long as they're criticizing big bad tech companies. Tech companies are only an issue for the newspaper business model they are a boon for the economy as a whole.

ihatethem 8y ago

Of course the NYT would publish a 1k word profile of a virtual nobody as long as they're criticizing big bad tech companies. Tech companies are only an issue for the newspaper business, they are a boon for the economy as a whole.