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>I don’t see what’s wrong with this. I'm with you from an ideological perspective, but from a practical perspective living in the current world the way it is,
by macspoofing 6y ago
>I don’t see what’s wrong with this.
I'm with you from an ideological perspective, but from a practical perspective living in the current world the way it is, they will get in trouble from either the American or European[1] regulatory bodies. And I'm surprised they don't get it. It's only a matter of time. It will take only one of their platform users or competitors to get fed-up and make a big stink (and there's already griping), that will start a chain reaction where they will have to do something to firewall their divisions, or they will be broken-up while paying multi-billion dollar fines and taking a huge PR hit.
I'm not a genius, but it doesn't take a genius to see that this WILL happen. And they are so stupid for doing what they are doing just to sell some Amazon-branded toilet-paper. They should have just stayed an open platform and not competed with their users. They screwed this up and it's too late to do anything about it now.
>Many retailers reserve some of their best shelves paces for their private label products,
Sure. And Apple can get away with heavily restricting the type of apps that can be distributed on iOS (so much so that you can't even ship your own HTML rendering engine!!!), but if Microsoft tries something like that with Windows, they would get in tons of trouble. Do you think Amazon in this example is more like Apple or more like Microsoft?
[1] Nothing makes European regulators as happy as going after American tech companies.
- boardwaalk 6y agoI’m assuming they’ve done some sort of calculus. If you were cynical, you could say they’re pushing the bounds because they know they’ll get whacked for something eventually, even if just for owning a huge chunk of e-commerce (already the case). And if they are going to, why don’t they choose what that’ll be, and the thing that makes them hardly any money? I’m sure they’d be happy to pay basically nothing (what, use their lawyers already on retainer and wind-down contracting of white-label crap? — and maybe pay damages, which seems unlikely they’d let it go that far).
- macspoofing 6y agoYou must be correct. They are a trillion-dollar company and they can certainly afford lobbyists and lawyers and accountants and consultants to tell them where the regulatory limits are. And yet, I cannot see how regulators will just let them take over consumer goods given their size and clout, and the fact that they are using data from their users to drive their business decisions on which products to launch and compete with those same users. I just cannot see them not getting into major regulatory trouble for that.
- lenkite 6y agoThe EU competition law fine is capped at 10% of annual turnover of company. So I guess Amazon can hypothetically stand to loose 17 billion.