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"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 th

by 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.
- avar 8y ago
  Perhaps "machine learning company" is a better description. Their primary economic moat is the scale of their established customer base, allowing for product recommendations, trusted reviews etc. > their core business is sales, > warehousing and order fulfillment Are you seriously suggesting that if I had even half a billion dollars and bought a sales agency, a warehouse, and an order fulfillment business that I'd be in any position to compete with Amazon? > We don't call Airbus a Tech > company either. Perhaps we would if there were only 3-5 airlines in the world, and all of them made their own planes (had their own proprietary server technology and top-down tech stacks), and some had de-facto monopolies in certain areas of the world (Kindle for books, YouTube for video). What does being banned from YouTube even mean in this comparison? I have no idea. This is why these new business models are something regulators are still catching up to.

by avar 8y ago

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.

avar 8y ago
Perhaps "machine learning company" is a better description. Their primary economic moat is the scale of their established customer base, allowing for product recommendations, trusted reviews etc. > their core business is sales, > warehousing and order fulfillment Are you seriously suggesting that if I had even half a billion dollars and bought a sales agency, a warehouse, and an order fulfillment business that I'd be in any position to compete with Amazon? > We don't call Airbus a Tech > company either. Perhaps we would if there were only 3-5 airlines in the world, and all of them made their own planes (had their own proprietary server technology and top-down tech stacks), and some had de-facto monopolies in certain areas of the world (Kindle for books, YouTube for video). What does being banned from YouTube even mean in this comparison? I have no idea. This is why these new business models are something regulators are still catching up to.