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Comment by VSerge | Hacker News Reader

This is not the first time Amazon is caught doing this. I don't believe they suffered any substantial consequences so far. They just continue ripping off products of businesses that are their partners, but Amazon as a sales channel is so vital to companies that I'm not sure even companies getting so blatantly copied are taking their products off the Amazon marketplace. This goes to show the stranglehold Amazon has on online distribution, and why it is appropriate to label it a monopoly in the light of such typically monopolistic practices and abuses. From what I could see Amazon is currently estimated as having a market share of about 50% of all ecommerce in the US.

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https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/competition_in_dig...

Thanks for sharing this! Just the executive summary and core findings, readable in a few minutes, pack quite a punch. And they don't shy from criticizing other parts of government for failing to conduct proper pre-merger checks, for example. The recommendations do seem to stop short of asking for a breakup of the existing monopolies, instead seeming content to make their further growth more difficult, which may be far from sufficient to address the issue at hand.

To be fair, it is very hard for the government to successfully prosecute an anti-trust case, because of jurisprudence by Robert Bork (yes, that Bork of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre infamy and failed Supreme Court nomination) that essentially gutted antitrust law in a shameless example of judicial activism in opposition to the plain letter of the statutes:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/robert-bork...

(that's a right-wing publication, by the way, not one that's ideologically predisposed against Bork).

Trouble is - I don't know what sort of consequences Amazon would find 'substantial' at this point. All the FAANGs have enough cash to shrug off billions of dollars in fines if they have to.

The solution to these problems is spinning off business units. That's why people say "break up big tech" and not "fine big tech."

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