
Amazon is becoming more powerful than we realize - bariscan
https://medium.com/s/2069/amazon-is-becoming-more-powerful-than-you-realize-2093d6860886
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UnpossibleJim
Just a note, Amazon is not responsible for Seattle's poor decision making when
it comes to city planning, the housing crisis and their poor decisions when
dealing with (or choosing not to deal with) the homeless situation in Seattle.
They have done plenty of horrible things, and the article is totally fair to
point those out, but it seems beyond the pale to blame Seattle City council's
failings and poor governance on Amazon. As for the roads, Seattle is really
three small towns jammed together, so the city planning was a nightmare, then
there was a few city corruption scandals, etc etc etc and now the police are
told to not enforce vagrancy laws and I think everyone is caught up. None of
that has anything to do with Amazon.

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pboutros
Amazon isn't solely responsible for Seattle's poor city planning (rather,
Seattle, Kirkland, Bellevue, Redmond, Tacoma, etc.), but they're certainly
responsible for ~50% of the influx of high-paid workers, which has increased
housing demand, and that has _certainly_ impacted Seattle.

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mandeepj
you are saying they should not have created this many jobs?

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hkt
There is probably an ideal amount of high paid jobs in a particular area. Too
many will push up local property price inflation.

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hliyan
This is a related, but somewhat tedious read:
[https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-
parado...](https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox)

Excerpt: _Amazon controls key critical infrastructure for the Internet
economy—in ways that are difficult for new entrants to replicate or compete
against. This gives the company a key advantage over its rivals: Amazon’s
competitors have come to depend on it._

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brightstep
Also, from the Abstract:

> the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to
> “consumer welfare,” defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to
> capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot
> cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we
> measure competition primarily through price and output.

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RickJWagner
As soon as Amazon becomes close to too powerful, they will be broken up.

It happened to Standard Oil (way back when), AT&T, even Microsoft got spanked
handily over Netscape.

Amazon will not become 'too big'.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_antit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_antitrust_law)

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sudofail
On the one hand, Amazon deserves much of the success it's had. They've changed
the game in both online shopping, and in infrastructure management.

Most liberal societies implement policies to create an environment of
diminishing returns, to help curb the ability of companies to get "too big to
fail". They also implement policies to keep the environment competitive for
new companies.

Tax systems that create an environment of diminishing returns seem to be a
good approach. If Amazon were paying the amount of taxes that would normally
be warranted for a company of its size, this situation would be less
frightening. But they've been able to take great advantage of the fatal flaw
in our current approach to capitalism: aggressive reinvestment and expansion.

There is no reason to suspect that Amazon won't succeed in fully vertically
integrating their supply change through private ship, air and land delivery.
There is no reason to think they will not succeed in aggressively expanding
into more markets, like music production, tv and movie production, audiobook
production, etc. And there is no reason to think they will not aggressively
seek to automate as much as they can to further augment their already
substantial lead in online retail.

None of these things are inherently bad. They create good products, good
services and are a general boon to society. But we need to put in some limits,
whether by better tax policy, or by taking a more aggressive stance on anti-
trust.

It's unfortunate that these sorts of debates often devolve into "Capitalism vs
Socialism", reductionist arguments. The truth is capitalism is a fantastic
tool. But unchecked capitalism has serious flaws, and regulation and unions
can help to keep things in balance.

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strikelaserclaw
I pretty much believe this is how tech will evolve in general. A small group
of big companies will completely dominate tech, consolidating talent, power,
and money. They have so much cash that they will buy out, or copy and
dismantle their competitors. Even in the valley, so called cradle for tech
innovation, the way of thinking for a number of years has been to create tech
and sell it to a big company. This is the end game for all capitalist
societies in general, in every area, the consolidation of everything by the
few over the many.

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cyborgx7
This article makes Amazon sound about as powerful as my impression was. Which
is way too powerful, btw.

