4 ms·

Breaking the company up into smaller units that don't have the monopoly power of forcing their sellers to fix prices.

• granzymes 3y ago
  But how? The smallest unit of a possible breakup would be a standalone 3rd-party marketplace company, and yet that unit would still have the same market power for 3rd party sellers as Amazon as a whole does today.
  • thfuran 3y ago
    Why is that the smallest possible unit? It may not be especially practical, but it's certainly possible to break Amazon up by retail product category (one company for books, one for kitchenware, etc).
    • granzymes 3y ago
      Because you run into the issue of "unscrambling the eggs". If Amazon is not organized by retail product category (and I would assume it is largely not), then it will be very difficult to split the company in that way. Courts really aren't in the business of restructuring companies and the last thing you want is for the new baby companies to fail because the restructuring went poorly. Which employees go where, who gets what IP, what happens to all the underlying website/physical infrastructure? A "3rd party marketplace" unit is already likely smaller than is feasible for a court to oversee. By comparison, it would be a lot easier to split Amazon into "AWS" and "not-AWS" because the company is already organized that way.