5 ms·

What's to stop Amazon from splitting it's retail business into separate legal entities entities by category to stay under the arbitrary limits? Or increasing

What's to stop Amazon from splitting it's retail business into separate legal entities entities by category to stay under the arbitrary limits? Or increasing 3rd party GMS, decreasing Amazon direct sales, and decreasing the 3rd party sales royalties to capture market share and stay under the revenue targets? Companies with strong financial engineering competencies will have no problem working around these limits. Instead of the government picking winners and losers, how can the rules be structured to level the playing field for everyone?

salawat 5y ago
In the presence of financial engineers, you can't have it any other way. This is how politics is supposed to work. You pick one organization (your government) that you bend over backwards to give everyone the ability to input to. Anything that starts to get too big for their britches, you implement controls for. Then the regulatory arms race continues.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> What's to stop Amazon from splitting it's retail business into separate legal entities entities by category to stay under the arbitrary limits? This doesn’t work. Beneficial ownership and common control would trace through the legal entities. If Amazon actually splits up its business, on the other hand, that’s fine! That’s good! No need for anti-trust action; they did it themselves!
- forrestthewoods 5y ago
  > If Amazon actually splits up its business, on the other hand, that’s fine! That’s good! No need for anti-trust action; they did it themselves! Let's assume for a moment that Amazon spun out... something. What specific problem does that solve? What specific benefit will the public/customers/clients/government receive? By what metrics is the split-up measure to measure whether it was a success or failure? I'm genuinely asking. I'm not sure. If the metric is "no business shall have a market cap north of $X" then it's pretty easy to declare it a success! But that's not a very interesting metric imho. So what is the precise goal? And how do you know you've hit the goal and not made things worse?
  - ddxxdd 5y ago
    Some forms of antitrust enforcement exists to protect the worker, other forms exist to protect the consumer. In either case, metrics can be employed to test whether success has been achieved. Worker wages, consumer prices, profit margins, market concentration, etc. can all be employed to study the positive and negative consequences of antitrust policy.
- stadium 5y ago
  It depends, if 3rd party marketplace and direct sales were split up into separate independent companies, the "sold by Amazon" items could easily flow through as 3rd party marketplace sales. And they would also be free to sell "sold by amazon" items on any other platform, even competing directly with the 3rd party marketplace and leaving it to fester. Product listing quality is already about on parity with eBay so it's not a big stretch. Possibly a better solution is to make all of the sales and inventory movement data available to amazon internally, available to anyone externally too. For example, the private lable shenanigans would die off quickly with more competitive pressure enabled by giving external players access to the same data Amazon has internally.

salawat 5y ago

In the presence of financial engineers, you can't have it any other way. This is how politics is supposed to work. You pick one organization (your government) that you bend over backwards to give everyone the ability to input to. Anything that starts to get too big for their britches, you implement controls for. Then the regulatory arms race continues.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> What's to stop Amazon from splitting it's retail business into separate legal entities entities by category to stay under the arbitrary limits? This doesn’t work. Beneficial ownership and common control would trace through the legal entities. If Amazon actually splits up its business, on the other hand, that’s fine! That’s good! No need for anti-trust action; they did it themselves!

forrestthewoods 5y ago
> If Amazon actually splits up its business, on the other hand, that’s fine! That’s good! No need for anti-trust action; they did it themselves! Let's assume for a moment that Amazon spun out... something. What specific problem does that solve? What specific benefit will the public/customers/clients/government receive? By what metrics is the split-up measure to measure whether it was a success or failure? I'm genuinely asking. I'm not sure. If the metric is "no business shall have a market cap north of $X" then it's pretty easy to declare it a success! But that's not a very interesting metric imho. So what is the precise goal? And how do you know you've hit the goal and not made things worse?
- ddxxdd 5y ago
  Some forms of antitrust enforcement exists to protect the worker, other forms exist to protect the consumer. In either case, metrics can be employed to test whether success has been achieved. Worker wages, consumer prices, profit margins, market concentration, etc. can all be employed to study the positive and negative consequences of antitrust policy.
stadium 5y ago
It depends, if 3rd party marketplace and direct sales were split up into separate independent companies, the "sold by Amazon" items could easily flow through as 3rd party marketplace sales. And they would also be free to sell "sold by amazon" items on any other platform, even competing directly with the 3rd party marketplace and leaving it to fester. Product listing quality is already about on parity with eBay so it's not a big stretch. Possibly a better solution is to make all of the sales and inventory movement data available to amazon internally, available to anyone externally too. For example, the private lable shenanigans would die off quickly with more competitive pressure enabled by giving external players access to the same data Amazon has internally.