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New internal documents show tech giants pushing out competitors

12 points by connor11528 4y ago

love2read 4y ago
Doesn’t every industry try to push out competitors? Either by buying them out or remaking their product.
- capableweb 4y ago
  The way that you do it matters. Participating as equals in the marketplace you've created is fine. Leveraging data or other things your competitors don't have access to, is abuse as no one would be able to compete against you in that case. Amazon using data from its own marketplace to know what "Amazon Basics" to produce is one example, Apple being able to use private APIs other applications in the App Store cannot use is another.
  - omniglottal 4y ago
    No, it is not fine. You did not create a marketplace. Amazon, Google, Apple, et. al. have captured markets.
- connor11528 4y ago
  Yup. There are laws on the books though like the Sherman Act, Clayton Act and Robinson-Patman Act that were passed in response to firms monopolizing industries and coercing competitors. If firm gets to powerful they can do anticompetitive things that make the American economic system run by powerful oligarchs instead of a more democratic free market. Capital tends to concentrate so regulation is needed to keep the free market system intact. In other words an economy run by monopolies isn’t a free market.
gjsman-1000 4y ago
It's not just Amazon. If we wanted to avoid this antitrust hellhole we are in now, we should have broken up Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Sears, basically everyone that crushed the small businesses at the beginning. Now they complain because Amazon is the latest thing crushing them. And soon, Alibaba and AliExpress might be the latest thing to crush Amazon at this rate. I think the biggest mistake was framing antitrust law as being whether a company harmed consumers. Amazon, well, its reduced prices like crazy and brought lots of competitive products out, so how does it harm consumers by that definition? It's hard to prove. If antitrust law was instead framed as preventing companies from making it inordinately difficult to compete with them, as well as companies with dominance expanding outside of a core market (like Amazon expanding from bookselling to Amazon Basics), then we'd have a stronger definition.

12 points by connor11528 4y ago

love2read 4y ago

Doesn’t every industry try to push out competitors? Either by buying them out or remaking their product.

capableweb 4y ago
The way that you do it matters. Participating as equals in the marketplace you've created is fine. Leveraging data or other things your competitors don't have access to, is abuse as no one would be able to compete against you in that case. Amazon using data from its own marketplace to know what "Amazon Basics" to produce is one example, Apple being able to use private APIs other applications in the App Store cannot use is another.
- omniglottal 4y ago
  No, it is not fine. You did not create a marketplace. Amazon, Google, Apple, et. al. have captured markets.
connor11528 4y ago
Yup. There are laws on the books though like the Sherman Act, Clayton Act and Robinson-Patman Act that were passed in response to firms monopolizing industries and coercing competitors. If firm gets to powerful they can do anticompetitive things that make the American economic system run by powerful oligarchs instead of a more democratic free market. Capital tends to concentrate so regulation is needed to keep the free market system intact. In other words an economy run by monopolies isn’t a free market.

gjsman-1000 4y ago

It's not just Amazon. If we wanted to avoid this antitrust hellhole we are in now, we should have broken up Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Sears, basically everyone that crushed the small businesses at the beginning. Now they complain because Amazon is the latest thing crushing them. And soon, Alibaba and AliExpress might be the latest thing to crush Amazon at this rate. I think the biggest mistake was framing antitrust law as being whether a company harmed consumers. Amazon, well, its reduced prices like crazy and brought lots of competitive products out, so how does it harm consumers by that definition? It's hard to prove. If antitrust law was instead framed as preventing companies from making it inordinately difficult to compete with them, as well as companies with dominance expanding outside of a core market (like Amazon expanding from bookselling to Amazon Basics), then we'd have a stronger definition.