Sen. Josh Hawley Calls For a Criminal Antitrust Probe into Amazon (theverge.com) 45
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is calling on federal prosecutors to open a criminal antitrust investigation into Amazon, as laid out in a letter [PDF] released on Tuesday. From a report: In his letter to Attorney General William Barr, Hawley presses the Justice Department to open an investigation into Amazon's data tactics that were detailed in a report from The Wall Street Journal last week. In this report, the Journal outlined several instances in which Amazon employees peered into the sales data from independent sellers in order to develop its own competing, private label products.
"These practices are alarming for America's small businesses even under ordinary circumstances," Hawley wrote. "But at a time when most small retail businesses must rely on Amazon because of coronavirus-related shutdowns, predatory data practices threaten these businesses' very existence." After the Journal's report last week, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee wrote statements seeking clarification on whether a top Amazon official had "lied" to Congress about its data practices in a previous hearing. Last July, Nate Sutton, Amazon's associate general counsel, said that the company does not use third-party data to create its own products.
"These practices are alarming for America's small businesses even under ordinary circumstances," Hawley wrote. "But at a time when most small retail businesses must rely on Amazon because of coronavirus-related shutdowns, predatory data practices threaten these businesses' very existence." After the Journal's report last week, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee wrote statements seeking clarification on whether a top Amazon official had "lied" to Congress about its data practices in a previous hearing. Last July, Nate Sutton, Amazon's associate general counsel, said that the company does not use third-party data to create its own products.
Let's do a deal... (Score:5, Interesting)
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I so wish our criminal justice systems weren't so tied to the political system.
Politicians have issues with companies and abuse their power to hassle them. Often because the company is selling goods and or services that are opposed to the party stance.
Often disruptive companies get the brunt from Conservatives. Because they are changing how business is done, and Conservates don't like change (almost by definition)
Established well-defined companies will often get burned from Liberal Groups. Because they ar
Follow the money (Score:5, Insightful)
Often disruptive companies get the brunt from Conservatives. Because they are changing how business is done, and Conservates don't like change (almost by definition)
Established well-defined companies will often get burned from Liberal Groups. Because they are not changing their behaviors fast enough for these groups. Eg meeting new Environmental regulations. Because Liberals want to see change (almost by definition)
It's a nice sentiment, but not true. The politics are more sophisticated in my opinion.
Bezos owns a newspaper that is concerned with facts more than narrative. Facts are not the friends of Republicans in the Trump era. They are open about their hostility towards Bezos for his lack of loyalty to Trump, AKA publishing facts instead of administration propaganda, like FNC and OAN. This is election-timed attempt to grab a headline for a new Senator...probably wanting a cabinet position in the Trump administration.
Everything Amazon is doing, WalMart and Target have been doing for decades, but Walmart is beloved by conservatives and headquartered in a red state and Target has been good about keeping quiet and apolitical. Conservatives never cared about Amazon until Bezos bought the Washington Post.
This is not about textbook liberalism or conservativism. Trump is only effective on offense, not defense. He's no longer an outsider and no longer has "crooked Hillary" to be his all-purpose foil. His surrogates are testing out Jeff Bezos as the target of hate for the rally circuit. They need an imagination-inspiring enemy to fire up the base. Bezos doesn't have a particularly appealing personality or much of a public profile, so he's a potential target...a rorschach test in which you project your anxiety and fears to....someone other than yourself you can blame for why your life didn't turn out the way you hoped.
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The problem I see, targeting Amazon vs the Paper is the big problem. The Red Hat Wearing Fox News watching base who is going to vote for whatever Republican in office because to them all democrats are Evil godless creatures. Is probably getting the connection shoved in their face all the time.
Also, the Hippy Flower Power MSNBC watcher will only vote for a Democrat because to them all Republicans are Vial Corrupt Racist.
So in terms of votes. 30%(R) and 30%(D) is already done. These fringe groups we can't
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You kidding me? The Washington Post, some kind of outlet for truth? Huh? This is the kind of crap they print. [i.redd.it] Bezos, and his WaPo, (and the NYT) symbolize what's wrong in American politics according to Democrats and progressives: foreign collusion, corruption of the political process by billionaires, and crony capitalism. And it's Democrats themselves that support these pricks.
Fifteen years ago, the Washington Post published the most sensational, electrifying, and thoroughly botched front-page story abo [wordpress.com]
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Mod parent up, but you have to admit that Jeff Bezos would be a natural as a Bond villain.
Personal disclaimer needed? I noticed that Amazon was trying to conquer my mind 20 years ago and decided I wanted no part of it. While I agree that this is a cheap political stunt of the GOT [sic], I still have absolutely no plans to shop with Amazon or pay to read the WaPo. (Though I sometimes look at the WaPo's free content.)
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I so wish our criminal justice systems weren't so tied to the political system.
Politicians have issues with companies and abuse their power to hassle them. Often because the company is selling goods and or services that are opposed to the party stance.
Often disruptive companies get the brunt from Conservatives. Because they are changing how business is done, and Conservates don't like change (almost by definition)
Established well-defined companies will often get burned from Liberal Groups. Because they are not changing their behaviors fast enough for these groups. Eg meeting new Environmental regulations. Because Liberals want to see change (almost by definition)
They way I see it is that just like the pharmaceutical industry, the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street and K Street they have all become too big and too dominant for the general public good just like Amazon, Facebook, Google have. People call Washington a swamp, but it's these special interest groups that supply the foul swampy water, the alligators, the poisonous snakes and the malaria infested mosquito swarms. Washington did not become a swamp all on its own. Each of the two US political parties have thei
Re:Let's do a deal... (Score:5, Insightful)
GOP gave LONG patent rights to drugs that are not given in ANY OTHER NATION.
GOP helped create Medicare Part D (drugs) , which interestingly, was never funded, and was a great deal more money than ACA, BUT, mostly because the GOP required that Medicare NOT BE ALLOWED TO NEGOTIATE PRICES. So, Medicare is the single largest buyer of drugs and yet, they are not allowed to negotiate down. Instead, it must be the average of what small-medium size companies(basically insurances) spend on the drug.
It is trivial to stop the nightmare.
1) require patents be 5 years for any medicine that does not treat the disease. IOW, if it is something that is on-going (think insulin), then only 5 years patent. If it is a treatment ( no more than 1-5 treatments ), then make it 10 years.
2) REQUIRE that Medicare negotiate all contracts, esp. on drugs.
3) encourage insurances to do their own drugs. Provide tax breaks for insurance/Pharmacies (kroger) companies to start doing generics, but also BIOs.
Re:Let's do a deal... (Score:4, Insightful)
We've kind of painted ourselves into a corner with pharmaceuticals with our combination of regulations, market regulation (or not), research financing, and patent laws.
On one hand, the business is clearly broken when it comes to actually treating people. Something must change.
On the other hand, the US is where most New Chemical Entities (NCEs) in the pharma industry are developed. NCEs are the actual new drugs, rather than re-packaged versions of existing drugs. Re-packaging existing drugs is actually more profitable (and different than "generic drugs"), but there's something about what we have done in the US that encourages the research, regulatory, and investment collaboration to the point that Japanese and European companies (the only other significant players in the market) typically develop their NCEs via US subsidiaries. Some thought is necessary for us to decide whether we want to keep this ecosystem. The answer may be "no."
Shortening the lifetime for new drug patents would likely end the development of NCEs in the US. An approach that would mitigate that would be to remove "cost of capital" of drug development. This gets a bit detailed...
Drug development of NCEs is a long process. The NIH and other government entities generally finance the first 5-10 years of development, primarily establishing the biological mechanism of a disease and identifying the specific piece of biology that could be targeted by a drug. After that, development usually shifts to a company for "early stage" drug development. After about 5 to 8 years, the drug makes it through the FDA and is available.
The success rate of this process is such that that most scientists who work at "early stage" have never (and will never) work on an NCE that actually becomes a sold pharmaceutical. (The relative ease of modifying or copying an existing drug or protein is a big part of why it is more profitable.) When I first started working with pharmaceutical scientists (I build lab equipment), I tried to make some small talk by asking "How many drugs have you worked on?" I still get a hard time for asking that question, it's similar to asking "How many times have you won the lottery?" There are people who have directly worked on multiple drugs from an early stage, but they are the superstars. (Again, "early stage." By the time you get to people like clinical trial monitors, it's possible you're working on a new NCE every year.)
So, you have at least a 5 year timeline to develop a new drug, with a very high risk profile. If you compare the cost of attempting any new drug development with simply sitting on the cash, or putting it in an index fund, it makes almost no financial sense to attempt to make a new drug. So the cost of capital is very high. There are other industries that have this kind of risk profile: agriculture, ship building, rocketry...
The way we've smoothed out those other industries is that the government has provided (rather large) loans to farmers and manufacturers so that they don't fall prey to the same "investment" behavior we're now all dealing with in the pharma industry. We need to break the investment calculus that leads to the cost of capital driving the cost to all of us for the product.
As for generics and drug price negotiation, one of the critical failures the current pandemic has exposed is that the laissez-faire "lowest bidder" negotiation approach taken toward medical devices and consumables falls apart when international shipping falls apart. Simply, when we negotiate for medical supplies in the future, whether those supplies are drugs or nose swabs, there should be a requirement for significant domestic manufacture.
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1) remove ALL exemptions, breaks, deductions, etc. from corporate and personal taxes.
2) have 20% corporate tax OTHERWISE, 0% IFF the company employs 40% (by heat cnt/hrs/wages), or if a retailer, sells 40% American-made goods here. That % increases by 5% / year, until it hits 80%. IOW, if they are doing the work here, then it is 0%. And yes, if the company is offshore, they will pay 20%, or they
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which interestingly, was never funded
Which was deliberate. Neo-con 'thought leader' Grover Norquist has never been quiet about their plan to run the deficit up so high that there won't be any money available for anything but debt repayment and the military.
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pharmaceutical industry is not the problem. CONgress is.
It may not be the problem but it definitely is a problem.
Re:Let's do a deal... (Score:4, Informative)
The same guy who is asking for this probe in Amazon did launch several criminal probes into pharma companies when he was Attorney General of Missouri.
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... y'know, clean up the swap.
Well, this does help reduce latency.
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Add Trump to your list, he is the swampiest of swamp monsters, allegedly appointing unqualified family and friends to high positions, using Trump hotels for gov't business, encouraging foreign entities to stay at Trump properties...
How about a probe to find out if he made money from promoting hydroxychloroquine, or just how much money in general he and his friends and family have unfairly made from his decisions/tweets as president.
And then a probe to see how many deaths were caused by the lack of qualified
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No deal. The flip side should be a full public investigation of Trump and all his cronies. Never gonna happen.
This is why the legal system should not be politicized. All we have now are kangaroo courts.
And no, I am NOT saying that Amazon is a good company. Amazon is quite probably the most evil corporate cancer in the world. If we could have an honest trial, that would be one approach, but I'd rather see changes in the tax system to basically force large choice-suppressing freedom-crushing companies to divi
COVID-19 Amazon response is theft (Score:1)
Amazon says they're slowing down shipments to focus on groceries and essential supplies. But when I ordered some clothing that was labeled Amazon Prime, they said it wouldn't arrive for 10 days. BUT it was in the hands of UPS by midnight. Which means Amazon hasn't slowed their process at all, they're just using cheaper shipping options and pocketing the difference. That's theft.
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It's all UPS. I received notice that my "Prime Eligible" order had shipped in less than 12 hours - but it's been 6 days since then. Why is AMAZON the one saying my order will be delayed at the time of order? Wouldn't that be the shipping company's duty to inform me that their infrastructure is overloaded, *if* that is the case at all? It seems to me like Amazon is just choosing slower shipping methods and keeping the difference.
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Probably hasn't shipped. I got the "it's been shipped" notification pretty quickly after ordering a PC through Amazon a while ago (just before everything went to hell). Digging deeper I found that the shipping label had been printed (therefore "shipped"). The expected arrive date came and went - contacted the seller, got a new date, and the missed that one too.
Was expecting a hassle, but they just refunded me after missing the second date.
"Shipped" is not always Shipped.
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Amazon says they're slowing down shipments to focus on groceries and essential supplies. But when I ordered some clothing that was labeled Amazon Prime, they said it wouldn't arrive for 10 days. BUT it was in the hands of UPS by midnight. Which means Amazon hasn't slowed their process at all, they're just using cheaper shipping options and pocketing the difference. That's theft.
Your conclusion isn't valid. I've exclusively been ordering food from Amazon and various orders have had different arrival estimates. Some of those have had two-week estimates. All have arrived within a few days.
Estimates are estimates. Amazon is prioritizing some products over others. That's what they've said. But if a warehouse processes all of the high-priority items and has additional capacity that day, they move on to the lower-priority items. There's no disparity between what they say they're
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But when the package that was "Prime Eligible" is in the hands of the delivery service in less than 12 hours (and it's been 6 days since then), why is AMAZON the one saying my order will be delayed at the time of order? Wouldn't that be the shipping company's duty to inform me that their infrastructure is overloaded, if that is indeed the case?
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Wouldn't that be the shipping company's duty to inform me
Quite simply, no. You aren't UPS's customer, Amazon is. UPS provides time-in-transit estimates to Amazon who then provides them (plus their processing time) to you.
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Keep in mind that online sales are probably 50% higher than normal because everyone is online ordering due to stores being closed and they have no other opti
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You misunderstand how their logistical system works. Amazon doesn't have a centralized repository for any of its stock, shit is scattered everywhere both within the Fulfillment Center and across the entire country. In stock items are shipped from wherever is closest and/or cheapest. Your closest FC probably didn't have any PPE left, but did have your Crocs handy. Rather than have people standing around playing with the robots they sent them. I ordered dog food earlier this month, which normally arrives
Standard in the Industry (Score:3)
I thought this was standard in the industry. Walmart, Target, and pretty much every other major retailer sells both their own products and third-party products. They use the sales data for third-party products in their stores to better develop and sell their own products.
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This is literally what Amazon Basics is, and it's an outright lie that they don't use sales data.
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The real issue is that they haven't been honest about using their sales data in deciding what products to create.
Walmart, Target, Home Depot as well. (Score:2)
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They save many hundreds of billions of dollars, especially for low-income people, per year.
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They save many hundreds of billions of dollars, especially for low-income people, per year.
While enriching and empowering and entrenching the CCP. That's just another of those externalized costs we're not supposed to care about.
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The answer is NO.
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We needed cheap goods, remember? We shouldn't be protectionists. We shouldn't start a trade war. We should embrace globalism and free trade. All hail the Free Market, holy be thy name forever, amen.
Instead of blaming those companies who have no social responsibility whatsoever, maybe we should also look at who told us these narratives and sold us out to begin with.
Stealing Data (Score:3)
I think the idea here is that Amazon isn't just seeing that quantity X of item A is sold at an average price of $$. They are looking at the detailed sales data that the sellers (all of them) think Amazon is not allow to view and use. And since they are THE ONLINE RETAIL GIANT (in the west), it's not like they are missing a bunch of data from other markets or regional resellers.
Many grocery chains are regional and despite in-house brands, Kroger (national-ish) can't see how many bags of Funyuns HEB (regional) sells to create the lion's share of market data to produce a Kroger house brand equivalent of Funyuns at the most appealing price point.
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The sellers in this case are using Amazon to sell their products. If I sold my products on another person's website, isn't that a little silly to expect that they not know how popular my sales are? They literally HAVE to know so they can bill me correctly for the sales they funneled my way. If I don't w
playing the game (Score:5, Insightful)
If you decide to sell through Amazon then you should expect that Amazon will look at your sales and use the numbers.
I imagine Walmart looks at how many Teva sandals are sold and then decided to 'clone' them (from an old lawsuit btw).
I image Target does the same.
This is the danger of doing business with megacorps.
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And that's why this is an antitrust probe.
There are things that you can do when you are not a monopoly that you can't do when you are. Amazon has a dominating position in online sales. (Is it legally a monopoly? I don't know. The probe would presumably decide that.)
The argument is that effectively, if you want to sell stuff to people online, you have to sell through Amazon. How true is that in reality? I don't know, but it does seem like something worth investigating. Amazon's economy of scale on fulfillmen
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Over half of everything on Amazon is sold by third parties. Many of them sell items "shipped by Amazon", placed in their Fulfillment Centers and shipped from there, while also selling through Amazon but shipping from their own warehouses, and then selling the same items through their own web sites. Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla of online sales simply because they do it better than anyone else, a state of affairs which is abhorrent to conservatives who thrive on connections rather than merit.
It's a funny time to do this now... (Score:2)
Considering that Amazon isn't struggling to keep up with demand and their competitors are cashing in on their inability to ship items on time. I'll bet that walmart.com and target.com's business has tripled over the last month or so.
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who wants to bet (Score:2)
That freshmen junior senator Josh Hawley's next primary opponent receives millions in out-of-state donations, and we never hear from him ever again.