Comment by twoodfin
4 days ago
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.
Yes. And? There's no claim that Amazon is part of a price-fixing cartel or other collusion.
A pure monopoly is one where there is a single seller or provider. The US grants limited-time monopoly power to a new patent holder, and USPS has a monopoly on traditional letter delivery within the United States, for examples. A pure monopoly is therefore not necessarily illegal.
In addition to that definition, quoting https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/monopoly :
"In a legal context, the term monopoly is also used to describe a variety of market conditions that are not monopolies in the truest sense. For instance, the term monopoly may be referring to instances where: ... There are many buyers or sellers, but one actor has enough market share to dictate prices (near monopolies)"
That use certainly seems appropriate in the context of Amazon's ability to dictate prices, as described in California's complaint, yes?
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