It's not the job of the average consumer to conduct antitrust enforcement. That's what governments are for.
The fact that ours is for sale to the highest bidder is problematic, clearly, but the whole point of antitrust as a concept is you can't just start a competitor, because of the predatory anti-competitive actions of the monopolist.
> It's not the job of the average consumer to conduct antitrust enforcement. That's what governments are for.
Ah the "government" playbook.
Life does not work that way. If I want to affect change, I have to get the job done.
The "government" is you and I. There's no group of people up in the sky listening to our complaints.
How many of the people here complaining about Amazon being evil have even written a grievance letter to this "government" that is supposed to step in and stop Amazon from being evil?
People are voting with their wallets and they want cheap consumer products with a great return policy made by sweat shops delivered by people urinating into bottles barely making minimum wage after accounting for overhead.
Every single Amazon customer knows this and they don't care.
> There's no group of people up in the sky listening to our complaints.
Do you not believe the government exists? Regulatory agencies aren't mythic gods, they're law enforcing bodies constructed by the people we vote for in every single election. You don't have to pray to them, you can just write them letters or call them.
Life does work that way, and has always worked that way since the beginning of the US. We have always regulated the market, even from the very first day that this country was founded.
> People are voting with their wallets
Yeah. And they're also voting by actually voting in the real elections that phrase is based on.
It's normal and realistic for government to break up monopolies and force regulations that help the market overall, especially in cases where market forces overall can't be trusted to enforce the same outcomes. We do this all the time; see pollution, price fixing, privacy violation, false advertising, and so on.
Arguably, Amazon itself only exists because of broad Title 2 classifications on the early Internet. No online business can in good faith argue that market regulation is unrealistic or impossible or inherently immoral, when the entire Internet ecosystem is built on top of the exact kinds of market regulation they're protesting: a forced level playing field that was forced by the government even though no individual consumer would have turned down zero-rated, prioritized, or access bundles through their ISPs.
The fact that ours is for sale to the highest bidder is problematic, clearly, but the whole point of antitrust as a concept is you can't just start a competitor, because of the predatory anti-competitive actions of the monopolist.