BeepAmazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products, making Amazon richer
WesternInfidelsThere was a time when Amazon was not full of scummy rip-off products, when it was not playing games with prices, when it was not a cloud-computing powerhouse, and you know what happened?
That’s right, they crushed their adversaries (retail shopping) and earned billions in profits. They won.
But somehow that’s not enough winning, there isn’t enough winning until all the value has been vacuumed up from the world.
Bezos explicitly undercut the competition for years to drive all of the competition out of business. Amazon took as much time from 1997-2016 to make as much profit as they did in 2017, which is also (not) coincidentally when they hit peak market saturation and were able to start raising their prices.
So what you’re talking about was real, but it wasn’t like, “back when Amazon was good”, they were just preparing for what they are now. Having a huge monopoly on just about everything has always been their win condition, and they’re no where near done winning.
kescusayAnd that is why I no longer buy anything from them. I’m just embarrassed it took me as long as it did to realize what they were really doing.
The frustrating thing is we can’t boycott AWS since so many of the sites we use run on it. But yes, we absolutely shouldn’t buy things through Amazon or any of the other web stores Amazon owns.
I have often wondered whether targeted internet boycott days would shake up AWS, but I don’t know enough about their billing structure to run the numbers to see how much that would dig into AWS profits + how much of their income is flat subscription fees vs. billing on number of calls and haven’t had a chance to dig into it yet.
The government, use the government. It’s our last chance to use the government to regulate corporations before they become the government
I am a big believer in regulation, and some governments right now are in a position where they can be pressured to take anti-monopoly action against Amazon, which I want very much to see. Being in the U.S. as I am right now, though… There are some state governments I would like to see act, but I am also brainstorming other nonviolent disruptive action which could be taken, because the federal government right now is actual fascists.
I was hoping last years shenanigans would have pushed Europe away from our tech companies. I don’t see much hope unless we can elect a new Congress that is willing to do Monopoly busting across the board.