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The FTC Sues to Break Up Amazon Over an Economy-Wide "Hidden Tax"
(www.thebignewsletter.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Politics
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Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states filed an antitrust suit against Amazon, one of the biggest companies in the world, for monopolization and unfair methods of competition.Ostensibly, the retail firm is the lowest price option in the market, and it offers “free shipping” to over 100 million Amazon Prime customers, for which it charges a $139 a year membership fee.
Consumers pay for the free shipping, it’s just a hidden tax baked into the price of what you buy by an extraordinarily clever scheme put forward by Amazon.
The firm even speculated that “media and selling partners may claim the removal of the clause was not only trivial but a trick and an attempt to garner goodwill with policymakers amid increasing competition concerns.”
Indeed, the stakes here are one reason that antitrust legend Bill Kovacic called the Amazon complaint “the most important case that the FTC has brought in its 109-year history.”
The second is something called Project Nessie, which is an algorithmic pricing system so egregious that the FTC determined that it deserved its own charge as an unfair method of competition.
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