Comment by cptaj
9 months ago
This is a serious problem. Internet marketplaces are so big now that its really hard to even have a business without them at all.
I think that after a certain size, these marketplaces should be regulated to insure due process between the parties. That way the whims of the marketplace owner can't destroy thousands of prosperous businesses at the push of a button.
We have similar regulations for utilities. The power company can't kick you out on a whim. I think the same rationale applies here.
I've argued this before; these companies have taken on a utility role and need utility-type regulation, i.e. an obligation to provide service fairly and universally, an ombudsman, viable oversight, physical presence, a local call center to provide local employment and to give back to the community, etc.
This situation where 100% of the taxi and food delivery profit from every small town in the world gets siphoned off back to a single office in California just isn't viable. Even from a within-US perspective it isn't viable.
That's exactly the thinking that led to the Digital Markets Act in the EU. Those marketplaces are effective monopolies or oligopolies in their space, so access to them needs to be regulated to ensure a level playing field.
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Ahh yes, another premature declaration of success by the EU, who haven’t properly enforced ePrivacy, GDPR, or a host of other regulations.
The EU is all talk and posturing, you can write any law you want but the tech companies already figured out compliance is optional.
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> I think that after a certain size, these marketplaces should be regulated to insure due process between the parties.
The solution is not for them to be big and regulated, it's for them not to be so big.
The main thing that would help here is to inhibit vertical integration. For example, suppose people had a legal right to pricing information. Companies like Amazon and eBay would be encouraged to provide an API and have no right to stop anyone from scraping their site for anything it doesn't provide.
Now anyone can make a product search engine that will show you results from any site. You're not stuck with Amazon's gawdawful search. And since anyone can do this, it's easy to enter the market and none of them will have dominance. Conversely, if you want to start a new retailer, or sell your own products directly from your own site, you just submit your site for indexing to the popular product search engines and customers appear. But none of the search engines can destroy you because there are dozens of them and the biggest one is only 15% of the market.
We need more competition. The target of the rules should be to lower barriers to entry.
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Look we all know governments can do some crazy things and regulatory capture is awful, but you libertarian types really have some strange ideas about regulation.
Half of this forum would be out of a job if it wasn't for Google, but still they down vote my comment and demand government regulation. They have no clue what they're in for. While Google has it flaws – big flaws – at least for the most they give anybody a chance to compete in the results ranking. A government regulated search engine or web portal won't be anything like that.
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It would be probably better to just ban the «too big to fail» ones.
Regulations tend to only help them at the expense of smaller competitors.
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