This sudden interest in “antitrust” action is another example of the extreme hypocrisy rampant among US politicians. It didn’t even start until politicians started getting antsy about Google and Facebook. They’re worried about “antitrust” action against tech companies that have demonstrated they have the power to interfere with government control of things by interfering with communications. Meanwhile, we haven’t heard one stinking word of government interest in “antitrust” actions against the huge banks and finance companies that have been ####ing American taxpayers to death.
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Those merchants who are forced to use Amazon are allowed by Amazon to make only as much money as Amazon wants them to make, which is “not enough to ever give even a ghost of competition.” Amazon is guilty of suppressing trade.
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Without Amazon these merchants would have been dead 10 years ago. Or never appeared.
You can complain about Amazon’s terms and conditions all you want. You can complain that they’re your only choice for first-tier infrastructure.
But if you want to lower costs, you have to scale. Downtown merchants went through this with Walmart a generation ago. The customers voted with their feet and went to Walmart, for lower prices. The difference this time is that Amazon is giving small merchants a chance to compete.
If you think Amazon sucks, create your own infrastructure. Do it open source if you like. Make it a co-op. But carping on how “unfair” Amazon is does no one any good. Except Walmart.
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I’ll see it when I believe that the right will be consistent on the application of anti-trust. Right now, their focus is on media access since they can’t stop them youngin’s (who all happen to be over the age of 30… wow) who make fun of them online with absurdist memes. Now they just want a captive audience via legal action, that’ll show them youngin’s for making PepsiMan talk smack about Jesus!
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More than that. People think of the (Teddy) Roosevelt era as the golden age of trustbusting, but in practice the 90s was probably the era that deserved this term, with the 2000s and 2010s not too far behind. The real problem is that it is increasingly clear that antitrust regulation, while still an important function of government, is by its nature an inadequate instrument to reign in many of the corporate practices we don’t like.
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