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Comment on Amazon's Monopoly of the tech industry is ruining the US economy

You need to read The Amazon Anti-Trust Paradox by current FTC head Lina Khan. She argues that the consumer price oriented monopoly definition is old and outdated in the modern setting. Price is not a sufficient proxy for market competitiveness, and in fact, price is often used to kill competitiveness by undercutting new and innovative products.

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wintermute_oregon@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I sound agree price isn’t always the best factor to determine a monopoly.

Walmart use to go into a town, sell everything cheap and drive everything else out of business.

It’s one of the many reason I hate Walmart.

Growing up we have a cool downtown area. It wasn’t big but had a bunch of small stores. They all closed within a year of Walmart.

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- dirthawker0@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  I avoid Walmart for this reason as well as quite a few others. I think I’ve bought about 3 items from them in the past 5-6 years and typically because they have something others don’t that i need that same day (the store is about a mile from my house.)
  
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  - wintermute_oregon@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Wal-Mart does a lot of things I don’t agree with. Their labor practices along with their sourcing and many other things make them the last place I will shop.
    
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JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
That’s a good point. Especially when we see so many things where there are exactly two companies competing.

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Buttons@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I agree. Price is important in a classic “free market” where people compete to sell goods and services for cheaper and whoever does it best makes a profit and grows, etc, etc.

This ain’t a classic free market. We frequently see companies become market leaders without ever earning a profit. That’s not a classic free market.

Succeeding as a company because you make customers happy sounds nice, but the most powerful companies today succeed by gaining favor from those already in power (venture capitalists, etc), and the customers are just a bargaining chip to be tossed about on the bargaining tables of the wealthy.

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