> It's not too surprising that this situation has come about, it's basically monopolistic manipulation of markets throughout the whole supply chain. A deregulat

> It's not too surprising that this situation has come about, it's basically monopolistic manipulation of markets throughout the whole supply chain. A deregulated neoliberal paradise has many similarities to a war zone economy. I actually tend to interpret it the opposite direction. This is clearly price gouging, which can hypothetically be regulated. To me, the underlying issue is that near direct-to-consumer sales combined with public APIs and tooling like these bots has led to democratization of price gouging. Instead of being able to track the gouging back to a few businesses who are doing a lot of it, we now have to track a huge number of people who are individually doing a little of it. It creates two problems. The first is that we don't have the resources to investigate and prosecute all the people doing it. The second is that each individual does a relatively small amount of damage, but it causes a large amount of damage in aggregate. We usually prosecute based on damage caused, but it's hard to show the damage of price gouging $1,000 or $10,000 worth of goods. If they were the only ones doing it, it wouldn't even be a problem. Yet, there's also no obvious collusion. They aren't causing scarcity individually, but they are in aggregate. I don't think the laws consider that at the moment. It also looks bad for regulatory agencies to go after fairly normal folks. I don't get the impression these people are generally rich.