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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
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Oh, FFS.
First of all,
read Ben Evans on Amazon's market share. He is smart and writes well.
From your first link:
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Would Amazon qualify as a monopoly?
Despite its explosive growth, Amazon falls short of meeting the US Department of Justice‘s monopoly threshold, defined as a market share of greater than 50 percent. By next year, Amazon says it will have around four percent of all retail sales in the US, and just one percent of the $25bn global market. So its share of the e-commerce market in the US is 37.7 percent, according to eMarketer. But online represents only 10 percent of the entire US retail market – with 90 percent still brick-and-mortar stores.
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The article then quotes Barry Lynn as saying that Amazon is a monopoly in books and some electronics. I suspect Amazon has a monopoly in e-books. For physical books, do they? If they do, are they abusing that monopoly? What do you think, Sebby?
The second link is a bunch of talking points from the American Booksellers Association, and if I was going to cocktail hour, I would probably rather spend time with those guys than with Amazon. Note first that when they talk about market share, they talk about "online" sales. But you can buy those same books offline. Not sure that online is a market, or that anything is stopping booksellers from selling their books online in competition with Amazon, except that Amazon is very good at it. I get the same book, cheaper and faster, from Amazon. You know who that is good for? Me. What's the harm here to Amazon's monopoly? Do you think people are writing fewer books because the publishers are making less money and paying authors less? And that's Amazon's fault?
If Amazon is driving down prices because it's using its size to drive good deals with publishers, isn't that good for consumers and the economy? Is there any reason why others can't do the same thing there?
I'd like to read the third link but I'm not a WSJ subscriber. Quote, please.
