Amazon faces potential break-up as FTC finalizes antitrust lawsuit
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The suit's main allegation is that Amazon abuses its dominance in the market to reward merchants who use its logistics (warehousing, shipping) and advertising services, punish those...

Amazon faces potential break-up as FTC finalizes antitrust lawsuit | The FTC is getting ready for the big one::undefined

  • panCat@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    2 years ago

    Read similar news about meta , google and even microsoft ! Now it feels like a hogwash !

  • YⓄ乙 @aussie.zoneEnglish
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    2 years ago

    Nothings going to happen. Its just another headline that FTC will do something but we know how it goes.

  • brap_gobbo@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    2 years ago

    I’ll believe it when I see it. I work with (not for) Amazon every day at my job and they are miserable e-commerce partners. One change in a code that suddenly and wrongly flags your entire international product offerings and pulls them? Good luck begging the teams of bots to “help” you.

    With Amazon you don’t even have the power to handle your own legitimate brand’s data management – changes to our listings go through maybe 20% of the time-- but somehow ASIN hijackers can make wild and dangerous changes to them with little issue. Not only that, but Amazon buttfucks you with fees on top of fees, like FBA fees we pay to entrust them to handle our products and returns well, but are wasted as our products are often stolen, broken, or return scammed.

    If you can help it and you like not crying in the bathroom at work, avoid Amazon.

    • Atemu@lemmy.mlEnglish
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      2 years ago

      I don’t think you’re the target customer of Amazon. It seems to all be set up for brand-less dayfly companies/scammers reselling shit from AliExpress, not actual long-standing brands.

      • brap_gobbo@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        2 years ago

        They do care if you’re a massive brand, to the point where you have a human point of contact to the company, but unfortunately we weren’t at that size. Anything smaller than massive tends to be ignored. Not even sure if they’re still doing that sort of thing, but they did when I started the job.

    • voidMainVoid@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      2 years ago

      Easily one of the worst places I’ve ever worked for, and I wasn’t even in a warehouse. Highest turnover I’ve ever seen. The reports about the company culture are no joke!

  • Pika@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    2 years ago

    Yeah I see no way this happens, if they wouldn’t involve themselves in Microsoft being a monopoly /anticompetitive they sure as hell ain’t going to combat Amazon

    • CriticalMiss@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      2 years ago

      Hell, I won’t believe it even when I’ll see it. Likely some loophole will be found to dodge this in one way or another.

        • ELI70@lemmy.runEnglish
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          2 years ago

          There is mods on lemmy? I just found out there is also karma, why are we recreating a toxic authoritarian shit hole but decentralized?

          • Zink@lemmy.worldEnglish
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            2 years ago

            Instances have to be created and run by somebody, so we automatically have a bunch of admins in the loop.

            Then somebody has to make communities on the instances. That involves choosing the purpose of the community, and writing any relevant description or guidelines. So again you inherently start with somebody in charge of the community.

            But none of them answer to a corporate overlord. Things are run the way the people decide. And if the people disagree, they can run different communities or instances. There can easily be unmoderated communities, and I’m sure there are.

      • jeffw@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        2 years ago

        Not to be pedantic, but isn’t that the same as “I’ll believe it when I see it”? You’re just saying it won’t happen

      • chuckleslord@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        2 years ago

        Yeah, there the FTC was with a clear market that Microsoft would have a monopoly over should the merger go through. They had Microsoft on the ropes, but, before they could finish them, Microsoft pinky promised prices wouldn’t go up. And that was that, no threat of a monopoly and the merger could go through.

        … the current antitrust ruling guidelines make enforcement basically impossible.

        • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
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          2 years ago

          It was more that George w Bush was elected. And cracking down on monopolies is against the code of fascists. Ideally they want to be in charge of all the monopolies. So he more or less called off the suit just as they were about to close in on Microsoft.

      • Corhen@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        2 years ago

        I want to see the same happen to Apple, to many fingers in too many pies.

        Their app store, + cell phone, computer, publishing, music store, streaming service, ect ect.

        Want to see google, Microsoft, apple, and others all broken up.

      • herrvogel@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        2 years ago

        Eeeh. Apple’s App Store fees can be a bit much, but all told the company doesn’t have enough power on any market to warrant such a huge intervention I think. Just forcing them to make their ecosystem more open would be enough. Like how the EU wants to force them to allow 3rd party package managers on iOS.

        • maynarkh@feddit.nlEnglish
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          2 years ago

          Luckily the EU wants much more, and already accepted regulation that will be implemented later this year to open all ecosystems up, completely. iMessage will have to provide an open API that provides the same service levels than the native client for example.

      • Phoenixbouncing@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        2 years ago

        Yes and no.

        The simple fact that you’re not using IE6 on MSN with Bing search to access a Windows server is more or less proof that the constraints placed on Microsoft at that time did actually have an impact (even if I felt robbed that the company wasn’t split up at the time).

        Today the one thing Microsoft is still dominante in is Office software (and even then Google docs is snapping at their heals).

        OS? Android is more popular than windows Server OS? Linux rules the roost Browser? Chrome

        The company that really needs scrutiny ATM is Google.

    • ELI70@lemmy.runEnglish
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      2 years ago

      What about facebook, disney, netflix, twitter, apple, uber, airbnb?

      • SCB@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        2 years ago

        Uber has direct competition in Lyft, among other rideshares and entrenched taxi companies. Disney and Netflix are literal competitors. You’re on an alternative to Twitter right now, and Facebook is yet another. Apple has competitors in every industry. AirBnB has both tons of competition and 26% market share - below Booking.com

        • maynarkh@feddit.nlEnglish
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          2 years ago

          Oligopolies are still not competitive. We need research into finding out what market share starts distorting competition, and tying antitrust to that.

          A market with 2 competitors can still be broken down further.

          • SCB@lemmy.worldEnglish
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            2 years ago

            Oligopoly has an actual meaning and that meaning isn’t “companies I have heard of”

            What’s funny is you hate Uber because you’ve heard of them but Yellow Cab had a literal monopolistic chokehold and you didn’t give a fuck at all.

  • varoth@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    2 years ago

    If this does happen, I hope they find a way to do it that doesn’t make Bezos and the like richer, like what happened with Standard Oil years ago.

  • bcrab@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    2 years ago

    They will settle for increased regulation, knowing their army of lawyers will be able to manage it all while the little guy will get snowed under.

    So we’ll see even more small businesses fail while Amazon will continue to grow because the gov’t was lobbied into killing the competition.

    • SCB@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      2 years ago

      How exactly does helping small businesses access a worldwide market they otherwise would never get access to cause small businesses to “fail?”

      • bcrab@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        2 years ago

        This wouldn’t be about small businesses accessing Amazon’s market - although the original point was that Amazon is becoming a monopoly and is taking advantage of that position with ridiculously high fees and commissions. This will be new regulations created and forced on every business (or ones that grow to a certain size).

        Amazon will say, “don’t break the company up, we welcome increased regulations to keep us honest” acting like that is a good compromise that solves the problem.

        The intent of the regs will be to stop Amazon from gaining an even bigger monopoly, but the affect will actually be smaller businesses will not be able to manage the increased red tape and change of laws (whereas Amazon has an army of lawyers to find loopholes, and waste time in the courts and not change a thing).

        This will stop small business growth and eliminate Amazon’s competition, further cementing the monopoly.

        • SCB@lemmy.worldEnglish
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          2 years ago

          Yeah I’m all about regs, but the idea Amazon somehow stifles small business is shaky at best

  • prince_equis_49@feddit.nlEnglish
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    2 years ago

    Does this need to happen? By God yes, a thousand times over. Will it actually happen with a positive effect? Big doubt.

  • Yondu_the_Ravager@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    2 years ago

    The FTC hasn’t had a spine in decades, I doubt anything will come of this. It would be nice for once if the government actually gave a shit about monopoly busting, but they don’t care anymore. Not when corporations are legally allowed to bribe the ones making legislation, oh and also companies can be people now