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The issue is not buying and selling companies, it's cross-domain consolidation. If Amazon can enter e.g. the diapers market not because they are good at making

by pyrale 6y ago

The issue is not buying and selling companies, it's cross-domain consolidation. If Amazon can enter e.g. the diapers market not because they are good at making diapers but because they can leverage their other businesses to kill competition, you have a problem. If google can pour unaccounted billions in advertising for any new product they launch while killing competitors' visibility, there is aa problem. The solution is not to force e.g. alphabet to sell all of their companies, but to make these companies act independently.

shadowgovt 6y ago
The question, to my mind, is how. So let's say Amazon declares their business is e-commerce, and they can't manufacture things they sell. And now there's ADiapers, that happens to make diapers. And Amazon Holdings, which owns ADiapers and Amazon. What stops ADiapers from optimizing their product to sell well on Amazon, Amazon building algorithms that preference ADiapers, and Amazon Holdings profiting off of this on both sides?
- Jach 6y ago
  You don't even need Amazon Holdings to own them, the same results can happen from regular old business partnerships. Maybe the government can forbid new deals between the offshoots, but that just creates middlemen. Or maybe ADiapers isn't viable on its own, so Amazon forms a deal with BDiapers instead, but the same net result happens. (Product placement deals are commonplace.) In the worst case you get the same anti-competitive behavior, where Amazon and BDiapers form a partnership where Amazon subsidizes BDiapers to kill off the diaper competition and then gets paid back after BDiapers jacks up prices. The government could put a stop to that too (and does occasionally stop anti-competitive practices of various sorts) even though there's no single company to breakup. There are other methods than breakup to strongarm companies into doing things. So why not use them instead of all this mess that would result from breaking up Amazon? Especially if we can't even show their diaper venture was particularly effective in anti-competitive goals? We don't even need to invent a diaper business, we have the whole Amazon Basics line as well as their Amazon hardware to analyze. Those do get preferential treatment, yet other in-kind hardware and products still show up and sometimes do better anyway (Energizer is #1 in 9V batteries), plus the alternatives have the larger share (majority) of non-Amazon commerce locations where they don't compete with Amazon. They may compete with store-brands of those places of course. Meanwhile for customers, the top 3 most trusted brands in America are USPS, Amazon, and Google. This talk is not about what the public wants or what's good for the public at all.
- pyrale 6y ago
  > What stops ADiapers from optimizing their product to sell well on Amazon, Amazon building algorithms that preference ADiapers, and Amazon Holdings profiting off of this on both sides? There are plenty of regulated markets that work pretty decently. Financial markets are one example where preventing the market operator to compete against clients was a critical condition to create conditions for the market to thrive. Ironically, most big tech companies that come to mind today _do_ lobby to have carriers broken and regulated as utilities. Do you imagine Verizon, Comcast, etc demanding 30% of Internet's revenue?
treis 6y ago
Google's never been able to bully an inferior product into the market. Their major successes (Search, Gmail, Chrome, Maps, Android) the product was clearly better than their competitors. Others where it wasn't (Plus, ChromeOS, GCloud, Wave, Hangouts, Duo, Shopping) they don't dominate the market.
- pyrale 6y ago
  Firefox took half a decade to reach 20% market share against IE. In the same time, Chrome became the dominant browser. I'm pretty sure that the FF-IE gap warrants to use FF as an example of organic growth, while Chrome is a clear example of aggressive marketing. You can acknowledge that Chrome was a good product _and_ that it got insane marketing, at zero cost. As for examples of pushing inferior products into market, some google search cards are good examples of it.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    Chrome was also technologically better. People seem to forget that it was the first browser to offer sandboxed processes. That was a game changer, especially in an era where we still used browser plugins Bel ize that weren't as well tested as the browser core and would periodically crash the entire process.
    - pyrale 6y ago
      I'm not arguing that Chrome was not an upgrade from FF. I'm arguing that FF was arguably an even bigger upgrade from IE, and despite that, it had a slow progression. To me, it seems hard to deny that advertising wasn't a key factor in Chrome's faster adoption.
      - treis 6y ago
        Nobody says being Google doesn't help in launching products. It's just not a decisive factor. They get exposure but if the value proposition isn't there then they don't win in the market.

by pyrale 6y ago

shadowgovt 6y ago

The question, to my mind, is how. So let's say Amazon declares their business is e-commerce, and they can't manufacture things they sell. And now there's ADiapers, that happens to make diapers. And Amazon Holdings, which owns ADiapers and Amazon. What stops ADiapers from optimizing their product to sell well on Amazon, Amazon building algorithms that preference ADiapers, and Amazon Holdings profiting off of this on both sides?

Jach 6y ago
You don't even need Amazon Holdings to own them, the same results can happen from regular old business partnerships. Maybe the government can forbid new deals between the offshoots, but that just creates middlemen. Or maybe ADiapers isn't viable on its own, so Amazon forms a deal with BDiapers instead, but the same net result happens. (Product placement deals are commonplace.) In the worst case you get the same anti-competitive behavior, where Amazon and BDiapers form a partnership where Amazon subsidizes BDiapers to kill off the diaper competition and then gets paid back after BDiapers jacks up prices. The government could put a stop to that too (and does occasionally stop anti-competitive practices of various sorts) even though there's no single company to breakup. There are other methods than breakup to strongarm companies into doing things. So why not use them instead of all this mess that would result from breaking up Amazon? Especially if we can't even show their diaper venture was particularly effective in anti-competitive goals? We don't even need to invent a diaper business, we have the whole Amazon Basics line as well as their Amazon hardware to analyze. Those do get preferential treatment, yet other in-kind hardware and products still show up and sometimes do better anyway (Energizer is #1 in 9V batteries), plus the alternatives have the larger share (majority) of non-Amazon commerce locations where they don't compete with Amazon. They may compete with store-brands of those places of course. Meanwhile for customers, the top 3 most trusted brands in America are USPS, Amazon, and Google. This talk is not about what the public wants or what's good for the public at all.
pyrale 6y ago
> What stops ADiapers from optimizing their product to sell well on Amazon, Amazon building algorithms that preference ADiapers, and Amazon Holdings profiting off of this on both sides? There are plenty of regulated markets that work pretty decently. Financial markets are one example where preventing the market operator to compete against clients was a critical condition to create conditions for the market to thrive. Ironically, most big tech companies that come to mind today _do_ lobby to have carriers broken and regulated as utilities. Do you imagine Verizon, Comcast, etc demanding 30% of Internet's revenue?

treis 6y ago

Google's never been able to bully an inferior product into the market. Their major successes (Search, Gmail, Chrome, Maps, Android) the product was clearly better than their competitors. Others where it wasn't (Plus, ChromeOS, GCloud, Wave, Hangouts, Duo, Shopping) they don't dominate the market.

pyrale 6y ago
Firefox took half a decade to reach 20% market share against IE. In the same time, Chrome became the dominant browser. I'm pretty sure that the FF-IE gap warrants to use FF as an example of organic growth, while Chrome is a clear example of aggressive marketing. You can acknowledge that Chrome was a good product _and_ that it got insane marketing, at zero cost. As for examples of pushing inferior products into market, some google search cards are good examples of it.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Chrome was also technologically better. People seem to forget that it was the first browser to offer sandboxed processes. That was a game changer, especially in an era where we still used browser plugins Bel ize that weren't as well tested as the browser core and would periodically crash the entire process.
  - pyrale 6y ago
    I'm not arguing that Chrome was not an upgrade from FF. I'm arguing that FF was arguably an even bigger upgrade from IE, and despite that, it had a slow progression. To me, it seems hard to deny that advertising wasn't a key factor in Chrome's faster adoption.
    - treis 6y ago
      Nobody says being Google doesn't help in launching products. It's just not a decisive factor. They get exposure but if the value proposition isn't there then they don't win in the market.