Amazon, monopolies, and anti-trust

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: David Magda <dmagda () ee ryerson ca>
> Subject: Amazon, monopolies, and anti-trust
> Date: August 7, 2017 at 5:08:43 PM EDT
> To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
>
> [For IP?]
>
> A 24,000-word article on (the lack of) anti-trust enforcement in recent decades, using Amazon as an example:
>
> > Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand 
> > widely instead. Through this strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves 
> > as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it. Elements of the firm’s structure and 
> > conduct pose anticompetitive concerns—yet it has escaped antitrust scrutiny.
> >
> > This Note argues that 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. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how 
> > integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive.
>
>       http://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox
>
> Cory Doctorow has a bit of a summary:
>
> > Last January, a 28-year-old law student named Lina Khan published a 24,000-word article in the Yale Law Journal 
> > unpicking a half-century's shifts in anti-trust law in America, using Amazon as a poster child for how something had 
> > gone very, very wrong […] .
> […]
> > The Chicago School holds that monopolies are only bad when they result in higher prices ("price theory") and that 
> > everything else -- the "structuralist" worry about rich people amassing political power, or making inferior goods, 
> > or screwing their workforce, or holding back innovation -- is just a distraction.
> […]
> > Using Amazon as her poster-child, Khan argues that whatever problems this approach had in bricks-and-mortarland (she 
> > highlights several), the combination of networks, digital goods, data-oriented retail, and huge pools of investment 
> > capital willing to float businesses like Amazon using their profits from one area to sell goods below cost in others 
> > to the detriment of their competitors, make mincemeat out of price-theory. The digital world -- where each customer 
> > might pay a different price, where retailers can use algorithms to price their competition out of existence -- is 
> > one where costs of one category of goods can't possibly capture the wider harms of monopolistic practice.
> […]
> > The problem with Amazon isn't that it's now really easy to get a wide variety of goods without having to shlep all 
> > over the place trying to find the right widget (or book). The problem is the effect that this has on workers, 
> > publishers, writers, drivers, warehouse workers, and competition.
>
>       https://boingboing.net/2017/08/07/economists-so-fragile.html




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