
Amazon should split into two companies to avoid antitrust fed scrutiny: Citi - ilamont
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/17/amazon-should-split-its-retail-and-cloud-computing-businesses-citi.html
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jmpman
Why does splitting AWS from the Retail sector address any anti-trust aspect?
AWS has viable competitors. Amazon proper dominates online retail, and its
expansion is fueled by AWS profits.

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Nasrudith
My guess is because the bundling long was a profit source which helped them
keep the margins low by selling their spare horsepower they needed for peak
load. Although the retail portion has risen in profits I believe so that is
less relevant now.

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QuinnyPig
“AWS started as spare Amazon.com capacity” has been debunked by senior AWS
leadership.

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acct1771
Source/tl;dr?

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18pfsmt
Asking for sources is fair, but when they are readily available can be a bit
tiresome:

[https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/cloud-
computing...](https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/cloud-
computing/the-myth-about-how-amazon-s-web-service-started-just-won-t-die.html)

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anoncoward111
And yet no comment about Comcast or Time Warner or Verizon? Spare me!!!

What a politically charged statement. Should we also demand that United Health
Care be broken up?

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whoisjuan
This. They keep acquiring competitors and doing massive mergers and nobody
bats an eye. Also, they have real monopolies in some cities where you can only
get their services with no other options. With Amazon, you can always go to
Walmart or Target or whatever. I have lived in places where my only option as
a customer was Comcast or Spectrum. How is that fair for customers?

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pasbesoin
The irony of such a pronouncement coming from Citi, does not escape me.

Yes, that reads like a quip. But, stop to think about it.

The scales involved, at this level of "dialog", are... well, intimidating,
especially in light of how the 2008 financial crisis shook out.

And regulation is apparently becoming a mere landscape feature, around which
to sculpt some sort of maximized shareholder (and executive) value.

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noetic_techy
People don't realize that social media, smartphones, and the even the online
retail space are akin to the invention of the railroad. Nobody has seen these
technologies before now, yet they dominate our lives in US. It's time to start
trust busting up these companies and increase competition. That's how the
capitalist system is supposed to work! You should never hear about a Trillion
Dollar company in the news unless it has 2-3 Trillion Dollar competitors on
its heals.

Market share needs to be taken into account here. Don't tell me Facebook
should remain just because there is a Mastodon out there. Apple vs Google is
not enough either.

Take a look at this visualization and ask yourself whether these behemoths
should exists:

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/02/technology/ap...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/02/technology/apple-
trillion-market-cap.html)

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chillacy
How is capitalism "supposed to" work at all? That concept exists entirely in
our heads, in fact in Laissez-Faire capitalism, this seems like a good
outcome.

And it's hard to say that Amazon has no competitors. MS and Google have very
similar cloud offerings, and there's always baremetal and running my own DCs
as an option too. On the retail front I can shop on any number of e-commerce
stores, and there's still physical retail as well.

