What law do you think they’ve broken to justify breaking them up? You can’t just dismantle someone’s business because you think they should structure it differently.
I think the argument is around anti-competitive behavior based on them controlling both the platform (Amazon Marketplace) and their own store (Amazon Basics/Whole Foods). This Verge article [1] cites the Diapers.com incident, where they basically cut prices until Diapers.com couldn't compete and had no choice but to be acquired.
There are also the ongoing investigations in Germany around anti-competitive behaviors. [2]
I'm not making a judgement on validity, just pointing to what people are likely referencing.
Reconsider the current system and change the laws, obviously. The Consumer Welfare Standard fails to capture forms of market power and forms of dominance that should be relevant to antitrust and do raise competition concerns.
What happens when Amazon hypothetically reaches state level income but doesn't break any laws? How much is enough soft power? How much is enough power for one corporation, monopoly or not?
It's interesting that I got so much push back for this discussion, seems fairly obvious this can end badly for the average person.
Businesses exist at and only at the sufferance of the society that grants that charter and need only be permitted to exist so long as there is positive social benefit to their existence. One cannot "abuse" a business by requiring them to properly hold up their end of the bargain.
We have mostly forgotten--to our detriment as societies around the world--that businesses exist to serve the collective us of citizenry and society. Not the other way around.
This has nothing to do with specific businesses, just the size and scale that businesses are reaching now. This has nothing to do with Amazon, they are just an elegant example of a broken system.
Corporations that have serious soft power but have broken no laws should cause us to ask deep questions about what it means to be "anti trust" in the 21st century. The consumer welfare framework is a weak and ineffective framework for today's modern corporations.
> The Consumer Welfare Standard fails to capture forms of market power and forms of dominance that should be relevant to antitrust and do raise competition concerns.
Why would I care about anything other than consumer welfare?
Screw for profit businesses. I don't care about their welfare. I only care about consumers.
Because consumers are also workers, that's how they have money to be consumers. If there are no worker rights, then there is no consumer income, and if there are no workers, because they have all been "made redundant" by a monpolostic oligarchy, there are no consumers.
This doesn't have much to do with workers rights, though.
If a company is in both the grocery industry, and the shipping industry, I see no reason as for how that hurts workers.
There are lots of grocery stores, and lots of shipping companies. Thus, one company does not control all jobs in these industries. It is not even close.
If you want to talk about minimum wage laws, fine go ahead. But that has nothing at all to do with conglomerate companies. It effects all companies, and arguably smaller companies are worse on this front, because they are less efficient, and therefore have less total money to spread around.
