The problem here isn't so much that Amazon is going to hurt Google. Google will survive. But we only hear about this story because Google is who Amazon is attacking (today).
The bigger problem is that Amazon has set themselves up as the global arbiter of commerce, acting as a relatively neutral marketplace matching buyers to sellers worldwide, replacing many or most of the smaller commerce hubs and marketplaces that used to exist.
But once in that position, they exercise control over which products can be sold with the explicit intention of destroying competitors, replacing what would otherwise be a consumer favorite with their own inferior (according to market preference) alternate.
Everyone talks about monopolists and moral hazard and market manipulation, but Amazon seems to be the only modern company with the unique combination of dominance, confidence, and poor executive judgment to actually make it a consistent and overt company policy.
If you saw the article yesterday about counterfit Nests still for sale and Amazon taking no action, I think it's actually worse than that.
Banning competition you don't like is monoploistic for sure, but intentionally leaving counterfitters versions up and promoting them to searchers for those products so it damages your competitors brand is just straight up evil.
Sorry, I got this mixed up with the counterfeit chromecast devices that Amazon is ignoring. Its hard to keep track of all the anti-competitive stuff Amazon is doing lately. ;-)
This is so true! And now as they have bought Whole Foods, they can do the same thing with grocery products by having options such as WF branded ones over the competitors (stocking 365 branded Sugar and dropping Safway Signature branded Sugar) through their Amazon Fresh or Prime NOW service.
Whole Foods was already abusing their position by setting strict quality standards for foods they carried, and reducing the requirements for their own 365 brand.
i've already seen that. Try buying some products that are not 365 (the WF private label.) The march has already started and is accelerating. Consumers beware1
Google is no angel themselves. What they did to Windows Phone is no different than Amazon's behavior. I'd imagine Windows Phone might as well died even if there were Google apps on it. But by actively preventing third-parties from porting their services to WP, Google intentionally tried to kill it. Now they now practically own the global market of smartphones. Not saying any of this is right, but I've less empathy for them.
>But by actively preventing third-parties from porting their services to WP
[citation needed]
The only history i'm aware of with google blocking app development on windows phone is when they sent C&Ds to people developing apps that stripped all the ads off youtube and played background audio. They also consistently take down and block android apps that violate the TOS in this way, and i don't see anybody saying that google is trying to kill android.
I'm sure Microsoft could have worked out a deal with Google. For example there were some patents for filesystems that Microsoft was enforcing for a while on Android phones.
> Google is no angel themselves. What they did to Windows Phone is no different than Amazon's behavior.
That's why breakups or heavy regulation needs to seriously considered for these companies. They have too much market power and have shown a proclivity towards abusing it in anti-competitive ways. The market has developed, and I don't think leaving it unregulated is working anymore.
We live in an era where people will assert that Standard Oil wasn't a monopoly. If a corporate action doesnt directly raise consumer prices, under modern legal thinking it isn't a monopoly.
The most ironic or telling thing about Amazon is that Walmart has now become the punchy underdog in comparison.
But on a more realistic note, Walmart has been pushing to be more innovative in the e-commerce ecosystem, purchasing various companies and opening new storefronts (like Allswell) to be more competitive.
There's also the advantage that they have in physical location.
Anyways, Disclaimer, I work for Walmart but my views and comments are my own.
I guess since Amazon can use it's monopoly position to hurt Google it would be fair for Google to punish Amazon by restricting who can find products through their search engine?
Maybe a little trade war between the giants would help them realize this is stupid.
I guess since Amazon can use it's monopoly position to hurt Google it would be fair for Google to punish Amazon by restricting who can find products through their search engine?
All that will do is push people to search Amazon first cutting Google out of the loop altogether.
I wonder if it hurts Amazon in the long term. One of the reasons for defaulting to Amazon is that they carry pretty much everything. The more items it doesn't stock, the more I will shop around and start doing that more generally.
> The bigger problem is that Amazon has set themselves up as the global arbiter of commerce
Amazon may yet become that. They are not that yet. Walmart has an infamous reputation for being brutal with suppliers. That reputation is far beyond anything Amazon has yet become known for. Walmart also completely dictates who has access to their vast retail system, which is still roughly three times the size of Amazon. Simply put, Walmart's system is radically more restrictive in terms of providing selling access, than Amazon - and it's three times larger.
Half of Amazon's retail sales aren't even from Amazon, they're from independent sellers, and that percentage has been perpetually increasing. For Walmart, it's almost entirely them controlling the sales.
It has merely become popular lately to point the fear cannons at Amazon. It's a cultural mania. Last week it was Walmart everyone was terrified of. In the late 1990s, every headline was breathlessly touting how Walmart was going to take over all of retail and put everyone else out of business.
Straw man alert!
Walmart introducing own-brand competition into it's marketplace and competing in price there. Amazon is introducing own-brand products into thier marketplace and forbidding specific competitors while leaving counterfitters of those same competitors. There's an enormous difference there.
Honest question: Is Amazon really that unique as a marketplace? How does the world wide volume of ebay compare to Amazon?
Do they have any traction in the Chinese market? I could easily see that one of the Chinese market places could make a push for the world market and be a serious contender.
Is eBay the right comparison? I treat them as different services - Amazon: primarily new products, fixed price, and essentially dealing with one seller (if there's an issue with a Marketplace item, Amazon CS will address it); eBay: mix of new/used products, mix of fixed prices and auctions, primarily dealing with individual sellers.
If amazon wants to get into the hardware game, they need to treat competitive hardware fairly or be hit with an anti-competitive lawsuit. There's no two ways about it.
This is creating an edge in the market where independent merchants and services can operate and their independence is their virtue.
For an example, Google has Chromecast/YouTube, Amazon has Amazon Fire/Prime Video, and they're less and less interoperable year upon year. This war creates an edge that Roku can squeeze into, which has support for every major vendor except Apple.
I find myself using Target and Walmart's websites more than ever before, not due to some moralistic protest, but simply because they're now more competitive and have products Amazon don't stock (like Google Home Mini for one example).
I find it interesting from a business perspective that Amazon chooses to push out competition, whereas most major retailers stock both own brand and branded products side by side, and profit no matter what the consumer selects.
I wonder when Alibaba US and EU will open. If Alibaba will sell anything and Amazon is protectionist, I can see that being Alibaba's edge.
When all the stores price match I have no reason to shop online unless I can’t find it in store. Amazon app is used almost exclusively to price match on my phone. Saved $1000’s
I’ll pay more to not drive to a brick and mortar at this point. I don’t want to get in my car and go to Best Buy or Target or whatever and hope they’re stocking what I want, when I know I can get it in two days from Amazon or another online retailer. I’ve been bitten by that too many times. I sometimes miss browsing in person, but I don’t miss wasting my time.
This is great if you have easy access to a lot of retailers, but this is not always the case. A lot of these stores that price match are in suburbs, whereas I am in the car in the city, and it just doesn't really work for me to try and make the investment to go out there.
If you bought a shield tv, you could have Amazon prime video. They're pretty nice. I'm kind of disappointed in the new model, though. It's nice having a fully functional Android device that can gamestream, use apps that aren't made for tv with the gamepad, and stream video.
The last line is silly. Sonos is not going to align specifically with Google. Because Sonos has a business model that is neutral to other home cylinders and voice assistants, and Amazon Alexa users can already use their Sonos speakers together with Alexa -- but not (yet) with either Google's or Apple's assistants. Sonos is similar to Roku in that sense.
You're also probably a lot more likely to receive products that aren't counterfeit when ordering from Target/etc. I've pretty much completely stopped using Amazon for that reason. It's just not worth the risk.
I see this come up fairly often, and it baffles me each time. I've probably spent an average of $50+/week on Amazon for the past several years and have never once received a counterfeit item. What items are people buying that are so frequently counterfeit?
Read the story about Amazon authorizing fake Chromecast devices to be sold, while blocking the real ones. Mind you the devices look exactly the same (minus better bandwidth.) Read some of the reviews from folks buying the imitation, knowing it wasn't the real deal, but nevertheless bought them because "where else could they buy from?". Those comments and now this make me wonder how strong Amazon has become to decide what consumers can buy or not.
In international competition law, using your dominant position in market A in order to gain a dominant market position in market B is clearly illegal.
Amazon is surely committing anti competetive behaviour, however i'm not certain about them legally speaking having a "dominant market position".
Let's say lawsuits are filed, it will be moot anyhow since this type of litigation requires more time than the actual battle for the market position.
It's almost certainly illegal. At this point in the fight, Google and Amazon have both committed several blatant violations of antitrust law. And the US FTC has done nothing about it.
It's possible they don't think two monopolies doing illegal things to each other is a problem, or that it cancels out somehow. Or they just don't want to do anything in general, as the case seems to be.
I fear that with the number of anticompetitive actions the government has failed to act on at this point, companies may legitimately be able to claim as a defense that the government allowing these actions for so long was implicit acceptance of them as legal.
It ought to be... maybe we'll see an anti-trust case.
Obviously, companies should have some choice in how they do business, and what products they choose to sell. I won't fault drug companies for refusing to participate in state-sanctioned murder, or super markets for selling exclusively organic.
Nor do I fault AWS for not advertising Google Cloud products.
But when you build a platform/infrastructure, maybe you also have to give up some control.
Amazon's app store, just like any other app that supports installing other apps, is already unavailable on the Play Store. One is of course quite free to sideload it if one wishes.
Very few people seem to remember Google started this little war with blocking access to Google Apps on Amazon devices and blocking their app store on Google Play equipped devices.
It is weird though because a couple months ago I thought they had announced they had come to some agreement, and now it seems to be escalating again.
Amazon is a very smart company that invests heavily in research and development to stay ahead and loved by people.
Amazon will continue to stay ahead of monopoly calls as long as they don't make moves like this. Monopolies can benefit for some time such as AT&T with software/labs/modern applications (C++) wiring for telecom, Microsoft with Windows desktop and getting people on the internet, Apple with the smart phone, Amazon with online purchasing, Google with search, cable/telco providers and broadband access etc. But once these companies start pushing too hard on the monopoly levers, blocking competitors, actively breaking competitors products/software/standards, blocking out fair markets, then they start to have problems and maybe will get broken up. AT&T was broken up, Microsoft got slowed considerably resulting in Apple/Google rising, Amazon and Google need to keep it fair or else it will get more and more heated.
Moves like blocking competitors or competing products, rather than just making better products, are troubling and signs that the some people in charge there are taking cheap ways out to gain short term advantage. Capitalism only works well when there are fair markets and competition, otherwise it is big fish oligarchies of companies that works for noone controlling everything.
I can't find an exact source right now but as I recall TJ Watson did basically this while working for NCR. They set up an exchange for buying and selling used cash registers and sabatoged the competitor's models so they'd get a reputation for being unreliable.
As someone who has been shopping on Amazon since the late 1990s I have recently stopped buying anything branded on there anyway, or at least anything branded where I care about receiving real OEM products. Still a fan overall but one too many knock-off products for me.
After a few years of using Amazon pretty much exclusively for everything then going back to other sites for branded items, I have been pleasantly surprised how much better "all the other" online stores have gotten at fast free shipping and reliable service.
I don't see why this would make anyone thinks this is illegal as it doesn't stop anyone from buying Google Home products. It isn't as though Best Buy is selling Amazon products and Apple stopped selling nest in their retail stores as well.
At this point, Alexa works nicely with my Nest thermostat. If they break that, then I will be mighty annoyed because I will have to reach into my pocket to change the temperature instead of just blurting out the desired temperature of my abode.
Sure, but at the same time, Google ranking shopping comparison sites lower didn't stop anyone from using them either, yet they got hit with $2.7B from the EU.
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The bigger problem is that Amazon has set themselves up as the global arbiter of commerce, acting as a relatively neutral marketplace matching buyers to sellers worldwide, replacing many or most of the smaller commerce hubs and marketplaces that used to exist.
But once in that position, they exercise control over which products can be sold with the explicit intention of destroying competitors, replacing what would otherwise be a consumer favorite with their own inferior (according to market preference) alternate.
Everyone talks about monopolists and moral hazard and market manipulation, but Amazon seems to be the only modern company with the unique combination of dominance, confidence, and poor executive judgment to actually make it a consistent and overt company policy.
Banning competition you don't like is monoploistic for sure, but intentionally leaving counterfitters versions up and promoting them to searchers for those products so it damages your competitors brand is just straight up evil.
Home automation though is a great network effects play which is why amazon is doing this.
[citation needed]
The only history i'm aware of with google blocking app development on windows phone is when they sent C&Ds to people developing apps that stripped all the ads off youtube and played background audio. They also consistently take down and block android apps that violate the TOS in this way, and i don't see anybody saying that google is trying to kill android.
As long as this is true, Google is acting a lot more objectively than Amazon and its anti-competitive behavior.
That's why breakups or heavy regulation needs to seriously considered for these companies. They have too much market power and have shown a proclivity towards abusing it in anti-competitive ways. The market has developed, and I don't think leaving it unregulated is working anymore.
Dead Comment
The most ironic or telling thing about Amazon is that Walmart has now become the punchy underdog in comparison.
But on a more realistic note, Walmart has been pushing to be more innovative in the e-commerce ecosystem, purchasing various companies and opening new storefronts (like Allswell) to be more competitive.
There's also the advantage that they have in physical location.
Anyways, Disclaimer, I work for Walmart but my views and comments are my own.
Maybe a little trade war between the giants would help them realize this is stupid.
Amazon has gone mostly unnoticed, and exerts their power without fear of reprisal.
All that will do is push people to search Amazon first cutting Google out of the loop altogether.
Amazon may yet become that. They are not that yet. Walmart has an infamous reputation for being brutal with suppliers. That reputation is far beyond anything Amazon has yet become known for. Walmart also completely dictates who has access to their vast retail system, which is still roughly three times the size of Amazon. Simply put, Walmart's system is radically more restrictive in terms of providing selling access, than Amazon - and it's three times larger.
Half of Amazon's retail sales aren't even from Amazon, they're from independent sellers, and that percentage has been perpetually increasing. For Walmart, it's almost entirely them controlling the sales.
It has merely become popular lately to point the fear cannons at Amazon. It's a cultural mania. Last week it was Walmart everyone was terrified of. In the late 1990s, every headline was breathlessly touting how Walmart was going to take over all of retail and put everyone else out of business.
Do they have any traction in the Chinese market? I could easily see that one of the Chinese market places could make a push for the world market and be a serious contender.
Isn't Alibaba trying to do that? (I don't know much about it, but do hear its name every once in a while)
For an example, Google has Chromecast/YouTube, Amazon has Amazon Fire/Prime Video, and they're less and less interoperable year upon year. This war creates an edge that Roku can squeeze into, which has support for every major vendor except Apple.
I find myself using Target and Walmart's websites more than ever before, not due to some moralistic protest, but simply because they're now more competitive and have products Amazon don't stock (like Google Home Mini for one example).
I find it interesting from a business perspective that Amazon chooses to push out competition, whereas most major retailers stock both own brand and branded products side by side, and profit no matter what the consumer selects.
I wonder when Alibaba US and EU will open. If Alibaba will sell anything and Amazon is protectionist, I can see that being Alibaba's edge.
I'm pretty happy with my Chromecast despite not having Amazon Prime Video.
How long before (presuming legislation continues to lag) we have
Apple-Fedex-Disney
Amazon-Ford-Spotify
Google-DHL-Sonos
Deleted Comment
Already open. https://www.aliexpress.com/
Deleted Comment
It's possible they don't think two monopolies doing illegal things to each other is a problem, or that it cancels out somehow. Or they just don't want to do anything in general, as the case seems to be.
I fear that with the number of anticompetitive actions the government has failed to act on at this point, companies may legitimately be able to claim as a defense that the government allowing these actions for so long was implicit acceptance of them as legal.
Obviously, companies should have some choice in how they do business, and what products they choose to sell. I won't fault drug companies for refusing to participate in state-sanctioned murder, or super markets for selling exclusively organic. Nor do I fault AWS for not advertising Google Cloud products.
But when you build a platform/infrastructure, maybe you also have to give up some control.
It is weird though because a couple months ago I thought they had announced they had come to some agreement, and now it seems to be escalating again.
I see this as more of a morale problem than a legal one. As a company advertised itself as customer obsession, this smells pretty bad.
Amazon will continue to stay ahead of monopoly calls as long as they don't make moves like this. Monopolies can benefit for some time such as AT&T with software/labs/modern applications (C++) wiring for telecom, Microsoft with Windows desktop and getting people on the internet, Apple with the smart phone, Amazon with online purchasing, Google with search, cable/telco providers and broadband access etc. But once these companies start pushing too hard on the monopoly levers, blocking competitors, actively breaking competitors products/software/standards, blocking out fair markets, then they start to have problems and maybe will get broken up. AT&T was broken up, Microsoft got slowed considerably resulting in Apple/Google rising, Amazon and Google need to keep it fair or else it will get more and more heated.
Moves like blocking competitors or competing products, rather than just making better products, are troubling and signs that the some people in charge there are taking cheap ways out to gain short term advantage. Capitalism only works well when there are fair markets and competition, otherwise it is big fish oligarchies of companies that works for noone controlling everything.
Deleted Comment
After a few years of using Amazon pretty much exclusively for everything then going back to other sites for branded items, I have been pleasantly surprised how much better "all the other" online stores have gotten at fast free shipping and reliable service.
At this point, Alexa works nicely with my Nest thermostat. If they break that, then I will be mighty annoyed because I will have to reach into my pocket to change the temperature instead of just blurting out the desired temperature of my abode.