Comment by malfist
4 days ago
They can't do whatever they want, we live in a regulated economy for precisely this reason. Otherwise you get exactly what is happening here, a company using it's near monopoly power to raise prices on everyone to enrich a few
In what sense does Amazon have “near monopoly power”?
Elsewhere in this thread we find shock that American households spend a few thousand dollars on average between Whole Foods and Amazon.com.
I assure you that’s a small fraction of household spending on the goods Amazon sells.
In the sense described in the lawsuit. See https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/2022-... for details, starting with:
> The policy and spirit of the California antitrust laws are to promote the free play of competitive market forces and the lower prices to consumers that result. Amazon, the dominant online retail store in the United States, has violated the policy, spirit, and letter of those laws by imposing agreements at the retail and wholesale level that have prevented effective price competition across a wide swath of online marketplaces and stores.
The linked-to article concerns a possible preliminary injunction related to that antitrust case.
You don’t need to be a monopoly for anti-trust law to come into play. Airlines can’t collude on pricing, for example, even though no single airline is a monopoly.
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