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> Amazon is definitely not a monopoly by any reasonable definition. All of the fields they are in have multiple other major players as well that they are in fie

> Amazon is definitely not a monopoly by any reasonable definition. All of the fields they are in have multiple other major players as well that they are in fierce competition with I can't agree with that. 1) Amazon self-preferences their own products 2) Amazon makes knock-offs of third-party products that succeed 3) For third-party sellers, Amazon is just about the only marketplace that matters. The rest combined don't come close to matching it. John Oliver covered all of this recently. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/john-oliver-tech-monopolies-1367047/ https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/john-oliver-tech-mon... https://fossbytes.com/watch-john-oliver-tear-apart-big-tech-in-simple-words/ https://fossbytes.com/watch-john-oliver-tear-apart-big-tech-...

NineStarPoint 4y ago
1 and 2 are anti-competitive (and anti-competitive practices on that level are 100% a reason to bring an anti-trust case again them), but that doesn’t make them a monopoly. From a buyers perspective, there are plenty of other places to go buy everything they sell. 3 is an interesting point though. I’m having trouble finding good numbers on exactly how dominant they are as a platform for third party sales but they have at least 3-4 times the GMV of their next largest competitor, Ebay. Best I can find is that, in the US, there was about 900 Billion in online marketplace in 2021, of which Amazon represented about 400 Billion. Being 44% of the market is probably bordering on monopoly level. (And to the first points, about half of their sales were their own products on their own marketplace, so I’d definitely be in support of an anti-trust investigation at the least here)
- Melatonic 4y ago
  It may just be that we need to update our definition of what a Monopoly is.
  - NineStarPoint 4y ago
    Personally I’d rather monopoly keep its meaning (a commodity or market sector controlled by a single party) and people use other words to describe the other ways a large company can be anti-competitive. But languages do often evolve to take a word specifying thing A that is a subclass of B and start using it to just refer to the entire Subclass B, so wouldn’t be unusual for that to happen.

NineStarPoint 4y ago

1 and 2 are anti-competitive (and anti-competitive practices on that level are 100% a reason to bring an anti-trust case again them), but that doesn’t make them a monopoly. From a buyers perspective, there are plenty of other places to go buy everything they sell. 3 is an interesting point though. I’m having trouble finding good numbers on exactly how dominant they are as a platform for third party sales but they have at least 3-4 times the GMV of their next largest competitor, Ebay. Best I can find is that, in the US, there was about 900 Billion in online marketplace in 2021, of which Amazon represented about 400 Billion. Being 44% of the market is probably bordering on monopoly level. (And to the first points, about half of their sales were their own products on their own marketplace, so I’d definitely be in support of an anti-trust investigation at the least here)

Melatonic 4y ago
It may just be that we need to update our definition of what a Monopoly is.
- NineStarPoint 4y ago
  Personally I’d rather monopoly keep its meaning (a commodity or market sector controlled by a single party) and people use other words to describe the other ways a large company can be anti-competitive. But languages do often evolve to take a word specifying thing A that is a subclass of B and start using it to just refer to the entire Subclass B, so wouldn’t be unusual for that to happen.