Deleted
Active member
The regime that enabled Amazon's monopoly power is falling apart | Matt Stoller
It is long past time for policymakers to fight corporate concentration. Fortunately, there is good reason to think they will soon do so
www.theguardian.com
The corporation grew in the 1990s and 2000s when new digital technologies were rewiring the American economy, so a lot of people associate Amazon with technology and innovation. But this is not correct; Amazon happened to capture control over a whole set of emerging technologies it did not create, at a time when anti-monopoly laws had been weakened to allow such control. Fundamentally, Amazon is a political institution designed to consolidate wealth and power.
Bezos could build Amazon the way he did because traditional business tactics that had been illegal, like pricing goods below cost to drive rivals out of business, had become commonplace and legalized by a judiciary that accepted these arguments. When Bezos faced a competitor, Diapers.com, he reportedly had Amazon spend hundreds of millions of dollars a month to undersell his rival, and then offered to buy them out on the cheap. Faced with unlimited capital willing to bear losses, they had no choice but to sell out. Rules against this kind of pricing strategy had been undermined by meek enforcers and a conservative judiciary that had rewritten the law to let Amazon flourish.
A true visionary
