- Nov 26, 2011
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I have noticed over the years some creeping changes on Amazon. Foremost is their practice of bumping other products to the top of the search results when I am looking for a specific product.
These search results are almost never the item I am looking for. Very annoying. Sellers are being extorted to pay extra to get their products bumped up.
For most of the existence of Amazon, Jeff Bezos ran the company as a loss leader in order to increase his market share. Now that he is almost a monopoly, he is capitalizing on it.
Merchants who rely on Amazon to stay in business are forced to pay a range of fees that trickle down to consumers, the FTC argues in the suit. “Pay-to-play advertisements” clog its store and “[degrade] the services” it provides customers, the regulators allege.
The long-awaited lawsuit, filed in Western District of Washington court, marks a historic political test of one of the world’s most influential companies — as well as the regulators who have promised for years to rein in its allegedly monopolistic practices.
[snip]
Tuesday’s lawsuit takes a different tack, focusing on a cornerstone of monopoly law: prices for consumers. Fees, requirements and incentives let Amazon collect one out of every two dollars a seller makes on the platform, effectively resulting in a “50 percent Amazon tax,” Khan said. The FTC argues those costs are then passed onto shoppers.
“Amazon is a monopolist, and it is exploiting its monopolies in ways that leave shoppers and sellers paying more for worse services,” Khan told reporters in a briefing.
These search results are almost never the item I am looking for. Very annoying. Sellers are being extorted to pay extra to get their products bumped up.
For most of the existence of Amazon, Jeff Bezos ran the company as a loss leader in order to increase his market share. Now that he is almost a monopoly, he is capitalizing on it.
Merchants who rely on Amazon to stay in business are forced to pay a range of fees that trickle down to consumers, the FTC argues in the suit. “Pay-to-play advertisements” clog its store and “[degrade] the services” it provides customers, the regulators allege.
The long-awaited lawsuit, filed in Western District of Washington court, marks a historic political test of one of the world’s most influential companies — as well as the regulators who have promised for years to rein in its allegedly monopolistic practices.
[snip]
Tuesday’s lawsuit takes a different tack, focusing on a cornerstone of monopoly law: prices for consumers. Fees, requirements and incentives let Amazon collect one out of every two dollars a seller makes on the platform, effectively resulting in a “50 percent Amazon tax,” Khan said. The FTC argues those costs are then passed onto shoppers.
“Amazon is a monopolist, and it is exploiting its monopolies in ways that leave shoppers and sellers paying more for worse services,” Khan told reporters in a briefing.
