An interesting article in itself, but more importantly how have I never heard about these two (in my opinion) damning facts about Amazon? Assuming these are tru

An interesting article in itself, but more importantly how have I never heard about these two (in my opinion) damning facts about Amazon? Assuming these are true, this is astounding. 1. Amazon's search results are essentially a payola schema. How high you rank in search results is mainly based on competition on who bid the most to be ranked first. Each company needing to bid higher to regain lost position and more profit going to amazon. To the point that 45% of sales price going to sellers is now collected by amazon in various fees and payola style bidding. 2. Assuming the above is true, then Amazon is running such an inefficient rent seeking market place and sellers are losing so much money that clearly a competitor would pop up and sellers could both make more money and consumers could get goods for cheaper. A true, win-win. But Amazon blocks that competition by saying you're not allowed to sell goods anywhere else for cheaper than you do on Amazon. Meaning customers can't benefit from swapping to a site that doesn't do all of this rent-seeking, so Amazon can keep rent-seeking. These are both incredible descriptions of what Amazon is doing. Can someone confirm these? If so, how has anti-trust not already been passed against them? > That's when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon's shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company's $31b "advertising" program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search. > Searching Amazon doesn't produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon's "Most Favored Nation" requirement sellers means that they can't sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.