such a small trite comment can't really be taken by itself as a consideration of whether or not amazon has behaved in an anti-competitive manner. it's not appro

such a small trite comment can't really be taken by itself as a consideration of whether or not amazon has behaved in an anti-competitive manner. it's not appropriate to look at a part of amazon's portfolio in isolation; their dominance in one particular area is not particularly anti-competitive. amazon's book sales dominance, nor their dominance as an e-commerce platform, seem to be particularly egregious. what's clear, however, is that they use their e-commerce position to also one-up competitors as a retailer. they have access to data about what's hot, what could benefit from a more economic option, etc. which they can use - perhaps anti-competitively (by e.g. intentionally selling at loss to defeat the new competitor). additionally, their entire cloud computing arm affords them the opportunity to run other parts of their business at a massive loss, perhaps intentionally (again, to defeat competitors) as needed. as an analogy, imagine if standard oil also had a financial operation that low-balled "normal" banks, intentionally losing money on every loan or instrument, just so those other banks blew up.