8 ms·

I'm all for antitrust, but it's a shame the Amazon acquisition was blocked.[0] iRobot was in a distressed state then, and immediately laid of 1/3 of staff when

by fny 10mo ago

I'm all for antitrust, but it's a shame the Amazon acquisition was blocked.[0] iRobot was in a distressed state then, and immediately laid of 1/3 of staff when the deal fell through. I knew a survivor of that mess. Now this. 0: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/29/24034201/amazon-irobot-acquisition-over-antitrust-regulator-scrutiny https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/29/24034201/amazon-irobot-ac... 0: https://archive.is/rBn7z https://archive.is/rBn7z

echelon 10mo ago
I was so angry at this. I want Amazon and Google to be broken up, but not in this category or along with these lines. This wasn't going to create some household appliance monopoly. Amazon has plenty of competition, and Roomba was already behind the curve. Now America is out of this market category. A category we invented. This felt like our last toehold in consumer robotics.
- rockemsockem 10mo ago
  Maybe one day you'll realize the contradictions in this post and think about how you cheered for things that led to this. I doubt it though
  - echelon 10mo ago
    There are no contractions when you look at how unfair market advantages are being played to harm healthy incumbents. Amazon helped dismantle the entertainment industry. Full stop. It doesn't mean Amazon's home appliance and home automation product lines or platforms are harming competition. There is robust competition in this sector. Amazon offers "free" entertainment, subsidizes the cost of series that rival HBO's Game of Thrones production costs using unrelated business units, market those movies and shows for free in the Amazon app, on their website, emblazoned on their delivery vehicles and on every item of packaging. Other companies have to pay hundreds of millions to match this. There is eyeball opportunity cost for consumers, and Amazon is flooding the zone with their free wares. This is a markedly unfair advantage. Amazon moves US union jobs overseas and trains up low cost crews in Eastern Europe. They buy up once successful studios on the cheap because they all tried to catch up with the stupid steaming game. Theatrical box office receipts are the biggest revenue driver for studios by a wide margin. Individually, studios could have countered Netflix and Disney by pulling licensing. Amazon in the mix threatened this, because they had existing content licenses and also controlled home media releases. The studios felt cornered by tech giants basically salting the earth. They had to give up healthy Box Office proceeds and exclusivity to chase streaming and defend their access to eyeballs as best they could. You've heard of Disney eating the mid market film? Amazon ate everything. It left no oxygen in the fish bowl. Amazon's entertainment business needs to be spun off. All of that can be true and completely unrelated to Roomba. Nothing should have prevented their purchase of iRobot. That was insanity.
    - tgma 10mo ago
      The contradiction is it’s just your opinion where to draw the lines which differs from Elizabeth Warren’s. You think your lines are good and hers are bad. She doesn’t. Many other interested parties would like half of it and want to change the other half. The only way out is to reject centrally-planned line-drawing.
      - echelon 10mo ago
        In the theoretical limit, a single monopoly owns and dictates everything. That's bad. In today's mega-conglomerate market duopoly situations, these companies' cash piles and revenues are so big that they can lumber into any industry they want to, dump on the market, kill healthy incumbents, and then leave shittier products and economics in their wake. They get to use their massive "platforms" as taxation dragnets. The platforms themselves barely innovate, yet they rake in enormous revenue streams by taxing all other participants and being the central connection point for all economies. Is it healthy that we only have two smartphone providers? That they can extort every industry - including crazy unrelated industries like fintechs, automotive, various entertainment industries, etc.? Is it healthy that the "URL bar" now means Google search in 95% of the panes of glass humans use to access the internet? That a search for a company's products are now a competitive bidding zone where every market participant is taxed on basic branding? Healthy capitalism should be brutally competitive. It uses regulation to ensure companies do not grow too big to escape evolutionary pressures. Google, Apple, and Amazon ought to be sweating - not sitting by the pool, relaxing. And they certainly shouldn't be able to become invasive species in other markets when their entry amounts to dumping. I love capitalism. A healthy dose of antitrust regulation makes it more distributed and less antifragile. It makes sure lots of stakeholders can pursue lots of objectives rather than concentrated labs that are merely the lavish luxuries of titans. It prevents laziness and ossification by forcing everyone to be nimble.
        tgma 10mo ago
        You know who else is a monopoly? The Federal government. I have received better treatment from the worst monopoly companies like Comcast etc than the services from the US government.
miohtama 10mo ago
Elizabeth Warren is proud of blocking this deal: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/amazon-irobot-deal-collapse-roomba-elizabeth-warren-lina-khan-antitrust-8d9c8657 https://www.wsj.com/opinion/amazon-irobot-deal-collapse-room...
- coldpie 10mo ago
  She should be, honestly. To me as an American, China has a better reputation than Amazon. Of those two choices, I'm happier with this outcome than giving even more stuff to Amazon.
  - qwerpy 10mo ago
    As an American with a strong personal interest (kids) in keeping the country strong and competitive in the future, it seems bizarre to cheer for our largest adversary to gain advantages over us.
    - coldpie 10mo ago
      I also would have preferred to keep it in the country, but the fact is that Amazon does more harm and is a larger threat to Americans and your children than China is. Hence "Of those two choices... I pick China." I would love for there to have been more than those two options, but this is where we ended up after decades of not enforcing anti-trust law, thanks in no small part to Amazon.
      - rjp0008 10mo ago
        I would definitely argue the opposite, that China is the larger threat. They want control of Taiwan and are building way more capable hardware than Russia has.
        coldpie 10mo ago
        Sounds bad man. Meanwhile, Amazon and its executives are union-busting to keep worker rights minimal, running a nation-wide law enforcement surveillance network, supporting Republican politicians and all of their anti-American policies and practices, lobbying to oppose anti-trust enforcement to keep hold of their illegal market positions and keep our economy weak, and they own one of the nation's largest newspapers specifically so they can control the narrative over their own actions. And that's all happening right here, in the US, influencing our laws and our media, right now today, not in some theoretical future. So yeah in terms of entities that are actually doing real harm to Americans, Amazon beats China no question.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
DevX101 10mo ago
I’m glad it was blocked. Amazon gives law enforcement and ICE access to Ring camera footage. I have no doubt they’d eventually be letting cops spy inside our homes with these vacuum cleaners.
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  So you’d prefer we send access to China? The comment above was pointing out that we blocked the acquisition that would have kept it in the country.
  - AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
    What was the last time a Chinese person shot a US citizen?
    - mattmaroon 10mo ago
      When was the last time you called a Chinese person to respond to a crime?
      - AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
        Is that an option I’m not aware of? Do chinese police even carry firearms? edit: most don’t (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-where-police-dont-carry-guns https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...) So, given that, I would choose 100/100 times to deal with Chinese police over the US ICE/police murder squads if I had an option
        osiris970 10mo ago
        In the U.S. you have free trials, in china you don't. What are you even talking about.
        mattmaroon 10mo ago
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
pornel 10mo ago
Amazon wouldn't have kept the manufacturer alive by making Roombas better, but by making it more expensive for other manufacturers to sell their vacuums through Amazon.
- tgma 10mo ago
  What’s the basis for this claim except some ideology you possess?
  - pornel 10mo ago
    In the sidebar of the Amazon website (which may vary by device/locale), I get Prime, Echo, Alexa, Fire TV/Tablets, Kindle, Audible listed before all other product categories. The special treatment so explicit, I didn't think anybody would even doubt it, but rather reply "duuuh, of course Amazon.com is for selling Amazon's own stuff". I'm a follower of Cory Doctorow's anti-enshittification ideology (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwkaS389W-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwkaS389W-g). Amazon is well-known for giving preferential treatment to its own products, while squeezing other sellers to pay for placement (Amazon ads). If you want something more data-driven, see "Self-Preferencing at Amazon: Evidence from Search Rankings" (DOI 10.1257/pandp.20231068), but this one is about everyday products. I'd expect Roombas to get more blatant promos like Kindle, Fire, and Ring products get. For example, if I search for "doorbell" on Amazon, the very first thing I get is a huge promo for Blink products (an Amazon company), four results from random brands nobody heard of, and then another huge promo for Ring (Amazon brand).
    - tgma 10mo ago
      That's not substantiating your initial goalpost. You suggested Amazon wouldn't make Roombas better simply because they can preferentially sell their products. First, empirically, that is false given all other hardware devices Amazon makes have improved over time and not particularly gotten more expensive. Second, preferentially selling it on one retailer does not suddenly make all the competition go away. Amazon is not a retail monopoly or anywhere close to it despite Lina Khan's bullshit paper that went through some mental gymnastics to create that myth. If anything, the synergy with the retail storefront can reduce overhead and decrease prices to the consumer.
lvl155 10mo ago
100%. Amazon actually has a sizable robotics presence in Boston. It would have been great for Boston job market and there are actually a handful of companies based out of MA including BD. You really need a cluster of companies to strengthen an industry. I mean see biotech in Kendall if you need an example. Every time I hear someone applaud China for doing it cheaper and better, you don’t actually know that long-term. Technology goes into China but rarely comes out of it. Meaning they like to “transfer” IP in exchange for cheap labor but they don’t share a lot of things. There’s a very real long-term price to pay for that.
- echelon 10mo ago
  How do we recover from this? Five years ago you'd be called sinophobic for suggesting we do something to stop bleeding industries to China. (My wife is Asian ffs, I'm not racist.) Yet we already saw how this had happened to Canada with Nortel, etc. China wants every industry it can have. If we give up technological salients, we won't be able to get them back. China has so many advantages - manufacturing, chemicals, materials, electronics. They now have better experience than we do with design and engineering. The outcome of this happening broadly and at scale is that high paying US jobs will disappear and the country will slide into economic stagnation. You wouldn't hire a robotics or mechatronics engineer in the US. There would only be small bespoke jobs. The vast majority of supply would come from China where everything is both vertically and horizontally integrated. Cheap, fast, better. These career sectors will shrink and atrophy. There won't be enough talent, jobs, or pay to support building new companies, meaning we're dead in the water and that industry is dead to us. We need to do something fast. It'll be gone within a generation if we don't. I don't have anything against Chinese people. I just want America to dominate or be competitive in enough key industries to keep us all employed and growing. For our own economic security and insurance.
  - bsndjdkd 10mo ago
    [flagged]
  - throw44d3etty 10mo ago
    > (My wife is Asian ffs, I'm not racist.) I’m not saying you are a racist but this statement never really holds much weight. I’ve met plenty of western expats in Asia that are married to locals, have mixed raced children, and yet still say the most racist things about the locals.
estimator7292 10mo ago
I think half the problem was the proposed Amazon acquisition. I was actually very seriously considering one of the newest Roomba models at the time it was announced. I decided to buy another brand because I knew amazon would 100% use it to spy on me. Now instead China is using it to spy on people. Glad I didn't buy one I guess.

by fny 10mo ago

echelon 10mo ago

I was so angry at this. I want Amazon and Google to be broken up, but not in this category or along with these lines. This wasn't going to create some household appliance monopoly. Amazon has plenty of competition, and Roomba was already behind the curve. Now America is out of this market category. A category we invented. This felt like our last toehold in consumer robotics.

rockemsockem 10mo ago
Maybe one day you'll realize the contradictions in this post and think about how you cheered for things that led to this. I doubt it though
- echelon 10mo ago
  There are no contractions when you look at how unfair market advantages are being played to harm healthy incumbents. Amazon helped dismantle the entertainment industry. Full stop. It doesn't mean Amazon's home appliance and home automation product lines or platforms are harming competition. There is robust competition in this sector. Amazon offers "free" entertainment, subsidizes the cost of series that rival HBO's Game of Thrones production costs using unrelated business units, market those movies and shows for free in the Amazon app, on their website, emblazoned on their delivery vehicles and on every item of packaging. Other companies have to pay hundreds of millions to match this. There is eyeball opportunity cost for consumers, and Amazon is flooding the zone with their free wares. This is a markedly unfair advantage. Amazon moves US union jobs overseas and trains up low cost crews in Eastern Europe. They buy up once successful studios on the cheap because they all tried to catch up with the stupid steaming game. Theatrical box office receipts are the biggest revenue driver for studios by a wide margin. Individually, studios could have countered Netflix and Disney by pulling licensing. Amazon in the mix threatened this, because they had existing content licenses and also controlled home media releases. The studios felt cornered by tech giants basically salting the earth. They had to give up healthy Box Office proceeds and exclusivity to chase streaming and defend their access to eyeballs as best they could. You've heard of Disney eating the mid market film? Amazon ate everything. It left no oxygen in the fish bowl. Amazon's entertainment business needs to be spun off. All of that can be true and completely unrelated to Roomba. Nothing should have prevented their purchase of iRobot. That was insanity.
  - tgma 10mo ago
    The contradiction is it’s just your opinion where to draw the lines which differs from Elizabeth Warren’s. You think your lines are good and hers are bad. She doesn’t. Many other interested parties would like half of it and want to change the other half. The only way out is to reject centrally-planned line-drawing.
    - echelon 10mo ago
      In the theoretical limit, a single monopoly owns and dictates everything. That's bad. In today's mega-conglomerate market duopoly situations, these companies' cash piles and revenues are so big that they can lumber into any industry they want to, dump on the market, kill healthy incumbents, and then leave shittier products and economics in their wake. They get to use their massive "platforms" as taxation dragnets. The platforms themselves barely innovate, yet they rake in enormous revenue streams by taxing all other participants and being the central connection point for all economies. Is it healthy that we only have two smartphone providers? That they can extort every industry - including crazy unrelated industries like fintechs, automotive, various entertainment industries, etc.? Is it healthy that the "URL bar" now means Google search in 95% of the panes of glass humans use to access the internet? That a search for a company's products are now a competitive bidding zone where every market participant is taxed on basic branding? Healthy capitalism should be brutally competitive. It uses regulation to ensure companies do not grow too big to escape evolutionary pressures. Google, Apple, and Amazon ought to be sweating - not sitting by the pool, relaxing. And they certainly shouldn't be able to become invasive species in other markets when their entry amounts to dumping. I love capitalism. A healthy dose of antitrust regulation makes it more distributed and less antifragile. It makes sure lots of stakeholders can pursue lots of objectives rather than concentrated labs that are merely the lavish luxuries of titans. It prevents laziness and ossification by forcing everyone to be nimble.
      - tgma 10mo ago
        You know who else is a monopoly? The Federal government. I have received better treatment from the worst monopoly companies like Comcast etc than the services from the US government.

miohtama 10mo ago

Elizabeth Warren is proud of blocking this deal: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/amazon-irobot-deal-collapse-roomba-elizabeth-warren-lina-khan-antitrust-8d9c8657 https://www.wsj.com/opinion/amazon-irobot-deal-collapse-room...

coldpie 10mo ago
She should be, honestly. To me as an American, China has a better reputation than Amazon. Of those two choices, I'm happier with this outcome than giving even more stuff to Amazon.
- qwerpy 10mo ago
  As an American with a strong personal interest (kids) in keeping the country strong and competitive in the future, it seems bizarre to cheer for our largest adversary to gain advantages over us.
  - coldpie 10mo ago
    I also would have preferred to keep it in the country, but the fact is that Amazon does more harm and is a larger threat to Americans and your children than China is. Hence "Of those two choices... I pick China." I would love for there to have been more than those two options, but this is where we ended up after decades of not enforcing anti-trust law, thanks in no small part to Amazon.
    - rjp0008 10mo ago
      I would definitely argue the opposite, that China is the larger threat. They want control of Taiwan and are building way more capable hardware than Russia has.
      - coldpie 10mo ago
        Sounds bad man. Meanwhile, Amazon and its executives are union-busting to keep worker rights minimal, running a nation-wide law enforcement surveillance network, supporting Republican politicians and all of their anti-American policies and practices, lobbying to oppose anti-trust enforcement to keep hold of their illegal market positions and keep our economy weak, and they own one of the nation's largest newspapers specifically so they can control the narrative over their own actions. And that's all happening right here, in the US, influencing our laws and our media, right now today, not in some theoretical future. So yeah in terms of entities that are actually doing real harm to Americans, Amazon beats China no question.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

DevX101 10mo ago

I’m glad it was blocked. Amazon gives law enforcement and ICE access to Ring camera footage. I have no doubt they’d eventually be letting cops spy inside our homes with these vacuum cleaners.

Aurornis 10mo ago
So you’d prefer we send access to China? The comment above was pointing out that we blocked the acquisition that would have kept it in the country.
- AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
  What was the last time a Chinese person shot a US citizen?
  - mattmaroon 10mo ago
    When was the last time you called a Chinese person to respond to a crime?
    - AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
      Is that an option I’m not aware of? Do chinese police even carry firearms? edit: most don’t (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-where-police-dont-carry-guns https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...) So, given that, I would choose 100/100 times to deal with Chinese police over the US ICE/police murder squads if I had an option
      - osiris970 10mo ago
        In the U.S. you have free trials, in china you don't. What are you even talking about.
        mattmaroon 10mo ago

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

pornel 10mo ago

Amazon wouldn't have kept the manufacturer alive by making Roombas better, but by making it more expensive for other manufacturers to sell their vacuums through Amazon.

tgma 10mo ago
What’s the basis for this claim except some ideology you possess?
- pornel 10mo ago
  In the sidebar of the Amazon website (which may vary by device/locale), I get Prime, Echo, Alexa, Fire TV/Tablets, Kindle, Audible listed before all other product categories. The special treatment so explicit, I didn't think anybody would even doubt it, but rather reply "duuuh, of course Amazon.com is for selling Amazon's own stuff". I'm a follower of Cory Doctorow's anti-enshittification ideology (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwkaS389W-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwkaS389W-g). Amazon is well-known for giving preferential treatment to its own products, while squeezing other sellers to pay for placement (Amazon ads). If you want something more data-driven, see "Self-Preferencing at Amazon: Evidence from Search Rankings" (DOI 10.1257/pandp.20231068), but this one is about everyday products. I'd expect Roombas to get more blatant promos like Kindle, Fire, and Ring products get. For example, if I search for "doorbell" on Amazon, the very first thing I get is a huge promo for Blink products (an Amazon company), four results from random brands nobody heard of, and then another huge promo for Ring (Amazon brand).
  - tgma 10mo ago
    That's not substantiating your initial goalpost. You suggested Amazon wouldn't make Roombas better simply because they can preferentially sell their products. First, empirically, that is false given all other hardware devices Amazon makes have improved over time and not particularly gotten more expensive. Second, preferentially selling it on one retailer does not suddenly make all the competition go away. Amazon is not a retail monopoly or anywhere close to it despite Lina Khan's bullshit paper that went through some mental gymnastics to create that myth. If anything, the synergy with the retail storefront can reduce overhead and decrease prices to the consumer.

lvl155 10mo ago

100%. Amazon actually has a sizable robotics presence in Boston. It would have been great for Boston job market and there are actually a handful of companies based out of MA including BD. You really need a cluster of companies to strengthen an industry. I mean see biotech in Kendall if you need an example. Every time I hear someone applaud China for doing it cheaper and better, you don’t actually know that long-term. Technology goes into China but rarely comes out of it. Meaning they like to “transfer” IP in exchange for cheap labor but they don’t share a lot of things. There’s a very real long-term price to pay for that.

echelon 10mo ago
How do we recover from this? Five years ago you'd be called sinophobic for suggesting we do something to stop bleeding industries to China. (My wife is Asian ffs, I'm not racist.) Yet we already saw how this had happened to Canada with Nortel, etc. China wants every industry it can have. If we give up technological salients, we won't be able to get them back. China has so many advantages - manufacturing, chemicals, materials, electronics. They now have better experience than we do with design and engineering. The outcome of this happening broadly and at scale is that high paying US jobs will disappear and the country will slide into economic stagnation. You wouldn't hire a robotics or mechatronics engineer in the US. There would only be small bespoke jobs. The vast majority of supply would come from China where everything is both vertically and horizontally integrated. Cheap, fast, better. These career sectors will shrink and atrophy. There won't be enough talent, jobs, or pay to support building new companies, meaning we're dead in the water and that industry is dead to us. We need to do something fast. It'll be gone within a generation if we don't. I don't have anything against Chinese people. I just want America to dominate or be competitive in enough key industries to keep us all employed and growing. For our own economic security and insurance.
- bsndjdkd 10mo ago
  [flagged]
- throw44d3etty 10mo ago
  > (My wife is Asian ffs, I'm not racist.) I’m not saying you are a racist but this statement never really holds much weight. I’ve met plenty of western expats in Asia that are married to locals, have mixed raced children, and yet still say the most racist things about the locals.

estimator7292 10mo ago

I think half the problem was the proposed Amazon acquisition. I was actually very seriously considering one of the newest Roomba models at the time it was announced. I decided to buy another brand because I knew amazon would 100% use it to spy on me. Now instead China is using it to spy on people. Glad I didn't buy one I guess.