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Comment by nickv | Hacker News Reader

Notwithstanding modern time, Google is notably absent in this article because it provides a good counter to it.

And Amazon didn't break the rules any more than its maligned and bigger competitor, Walmart. Am I wrong? I think they grew by running a tight ship.

Amazon breaks "Deploying capital as a weapon."

Basically their entire shopping ecosystem didn't make money for years and years and years.

Because they plowed their revenues back into the company, using their capital productively. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HiJXb8S58o

Amazon is the poster child for cheat to win. They grew fat by circumventing state sales tax for many years.

"Amazon.com originally collected sales tax only from five states as of 2011, but as of April 2017 collects sales taxes from customers in all 45 states that have a state sales tax"

Case law at the time was that mail order sales didn't need to collect sales tax unless there was a nexus in the state. Amazon may have done some funny business to claim no nexus in some states, I seem to recall allegations that had Kindle development in the Bay Area under a subsidiary and didn't pay sales tax in California. But mostly, they kept their warehouses and distribution centers outside states they didn't want to pay sales tax to, and that followed case law (but case law changed when it was relitigated)

IANAL, but SCOTUS finally decided "every business must pay sales tax everywhere" in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., 585 U.S. ___ (2018).[0] (Where ___ has a preliminary value of 162.[1])

0. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/585/17-494/

1. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/preliminaryprint/585US...

Sure it wasn't exactly foul play, but it was a major legal exploit that has since been patched. If the exploit didn't exist in the first place, then Amazon probably wouldn't either.

I don't think there's any evidence that this is true. Avoiding sales tax is nice, but it's -not- the reason online retail took over the world.

Outside of math, science, and law, proof and evidence are tricky words. Instead I merely offer a quote for your consideration, from Brad Stone's book The Everything Store (2013):

""" Bezos chose to start his company in Seattle because of the city’s reputation as a technology hub and because the state of Washington had a relatively small population (compared to California, New York, and Texas), which meant that Amazon would have to collect state sales tax from only a minor percentage of customers…. [T]he University of Washington produced a steady stream of computer science graduates. Seattle was also close to one of the two big book distributors: Ingram had a warehouse a six-hour drive away, in Roseburg, Oregon """

In other words, Bezos was well aware of the sales tax advantage from the start.

I mean, it was settled law from 1992. Certainly, SCOTUS ruled differently in 2018, and SCOTUS rulings aren't always moral or fair, but nobody is going to pay a tax if there's case law that says they don't have to.

Better prices wasn't the only reason for Amazon's sucess. A wider catalog was also a big deal, and paying sales taxes wouldn't have impacted the size of the catalog. Afaik, they also did well in states where they had nexus and paid sales taxes from early on, too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quill_Corp._v._North_Dakota

Amazon started as a bookstore and famously didn't see profit for years. The larger catalog didn't come into play until after the business model and technology were battle tested. Yes the catalog helped by triggering their hyper growth, but they were well established by that point.

It had a larger catalog for books too. Same process to buy current best seller and anything else in print. As opposed to going to the book store and if it's not there you've got to find someone who can order it, and then it arrives at the store and not your house.

Oh yeah, I remember the '98 Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA). It drove adoption of e-commerce because it undercut local sellers. Such were the days of the Wild West before the final nail in the coffin, South Dakota v. Wayfair.

Google is actually a pretty good example.

They provided a lot of value initially but now any remotely commercial query has only sponsored links above the fold. If you want to sell anything on the internet, you're probably paying them or facebook a hefty vig. They also used their position in search to push their other products, they make you pay to buy keywords for your own trademarks, they aggressively track you in order to build an advertising profile, etc, etc.

Enshittification is well documented in tech. There is some initial value or innovation and then it always turns into gatekeeping and value extraction.

Do they?

I thought they break "misusing user trust". Google is the ultimate surveillance capitalism engine.

They also regularly get in trouble for anti trust.

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