All these 3rd party companies want is a "farmers market", a stall to sell their wares. Give them the municipal software infrastructure they need to do so and maintain it as a public good.
It's a catch-22 ... would Amazon be this innovative had it been nationalised?
At what point do you nationalise? Is there a next technology which will be stifled if it was nationalise?
Does nationalisation sttifle innovation?
I've been wrestling with these questions as I actually don't like Amazon for all the reasons that have been well publicised ... but their customer service is excellent.
Which sets me against a string of recent bad experiences with local suppliers, getting stung, and thinking ... well, if Amazon treat me better, why shouldn't I move away from local suppliers and stick with the monopoly? Which goes against a lot I believe in.
I guess the problem is it's putting a lot of trust in Amazon. Which is itself an argument for nationalisation. I don't know.
Amazon the marketplace isn’t terribly innovative. It’s a marketplace supported by fantastic logistics, and most of it is backed by USPS anyways. There’s only so much you can do to remove the pains from buyers, sounds like we’re there.
> It’s a marketplace supported by fantastic logistics, and most of it is backed by USPS anyways.
Not any more, USPS was only used for shipping anyway.
Amazon has shifted to vertical integration wherever they can - they run everything they can, from air freight (with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Air) over their infamous warehouses to last-mile delivery with either in-house staff or "contractor" schemes set up to avoid labor regulations.
That last bit is an "innovation" I would (and have, when I could) pay many for to avoid.
My mailman knows where I live, can enter the building with a key and knows my door.
Amazon contractors keep calling me an hour ahead "will I be there?" then can't deliver the parcel to a nearby post office when I'm not. Over the last year of work-from-home this wasn't much of an issue but when you have a regular office job it can take a few days to get that parcel.
Precisely. Much of the "innovations" and "efficiencies" touted (by Amazon and by many other players) are actually not any material/physical/technical improvements, but financial games, buying competitors, operating at a loss, regulatory evasion, monopolisation, etc.
I mean, business/financial innovation is a legitimate kind of innovation. I'm not harping on Amazon for that. I just think that discussions about "loss of innovation" smuggle in some irrational fears about loss of technology when there are no real reasons to.
Right. I wonder how much competition Amazon has eliminated over the years with their shady business practices. That competition may have driven innovation even further.
> Amazon the marketplace isn’t terribly innovative. It’s a marketplace supported by fantastic logistics
These two statements contradict each other. The thing that Amazon does extremely well is logistics and that is core to their marketplace, not something else to the side.
Amazon.com in my opinion is a logistics company who happens to have a Website that sells products.
Amazon moves an item from point a to point b, and they do it fast and efficient enough that people go back to them again and again.
Last month, I ordered two pairs of jeans and a t-shirt from Eddie Bauer. They arrived in three different packages after about 10 days. With Amazon, it would have been 1 package that arrives the next morning or the following day.
If Amazon is abusing its position, substantial fines or regulations are the right solution in my opinion. I’m absolutely not in favor of nationalization. Any kind of government run facility, in my experience, is mind mumbling horrible at their job. They have no incentive to compete - which might eliminate bad behavior but it also makes for a terrible customer experience. Nationalizing Amazon is no different than just killing the company entirely.
It's pretty amazing to me how unsophisticated the filters and search criteria are. There are so many products where I'd like to filter or sort on weight (for instance) and it simply isn't possible.
Nonetheless as a semi-monopoly you are rarely compelled to innovate like a smaller company is.
They can do better, no doubt, but it is a problem that sounds like it should be easy to solve, but becomes really rather tricky at Amazon’s scale and with their catalogue size, speed of updates to it, and general dependency on the quality of data provided by the sellers. Try defining good filter values when you have thousands of product categories with millions of products, many of which have poorly defined attributes, while all of this is subject to constant change. Quite a task.
Nothing is trivial at that size but given the immense resources and market power at their disposal, I find it more convincing that it's just not a priority because their market position is already too secure.
I heard similar excuses back in the IE6 heyday for how improving the browser was "hard". Realistically 94% market share just meant that it wasn't broken from Microsoft's perspective.
How so? Whether or not amazon innovates should have no bearing on a decision by congress to levy additional taxes against them. If amazon decides to become shittier as a result, someone else can fill that void.
Even that is not really true. They paid no federal income tax in 2017 and 2018, but have before and since.
I'm no fan of Amazon, but you have to admit there is a pretty large distance between "Amazon pays no tax" and "Amazon pays billions in tax, but they didn't pay this one specific kind of tax a couple years ago".
Amazon went 2 years without paying _income_ tax, not 4.
Amazon paid $3.5 billion in taxes in 2019 (some of which was differed, but still owed). That is over 25% of their income that year. Their federal income tax rate came out to 1.6%, but its borderline lying to say "they paid a measly 1.6% in taxes".
Amazon is an awful company. There is no reason to bend the truth to try and show how awful they are. Being disingenuous only makes your argument weaker.
I misread the article, and I'll correct the 4 to 2 years now.
Income is income though, not sales or payroll which are the expected and manageable operating costs of overhead and human resources.
If I win the lottery, almost 50% of my winnings go back to the state, and I haven't even bought anything with those winnings. What's different about Amazon having a banner year?
> What's different about Amazon having a banner year?
The big difference is that Amazon is a company.
If Amazon decides to pay out large bonuses or dividends with its surplus, that gets taxed at the same rate as your lottery winnings. Before that happens, the income is Amazon's and not an individual's. There is no reason to expect the corporate income tax to behave the same way as individual's income tax.
Because that's how lotteries work in the US. Companies don't have to be behemoths to pay no tax on income. They just have to post no profits by spending all the money they make on opex and capex.
I understand the system, I just want to be clear how broken this is.
Both are windfalls, one gets taxed immediately, the other gets taxed if they don't use up all their profits reinvesting in themselves by the end of the year.
I don't see how you can think this is broken. Think about the implications if it wasn't like this. Bankruptcy would be rampant and R&D investment would be impossible for everyone but the largest companies.
Well yes, governments tend to like their industrial bases growing and are willing to wait for bigger gains over a longer time period. That isn't broken it is by design.
I guess it depends on the context. When I am filing my income tax, I am focused on that. But when budgeting or discussing tax liability in general, I certainly don't forget about the tens of thousands of dollars I pay in local, sales, SS, etc taxes.
I would certainly not make the claim "I paid no taxes this year" if I managed to skirt only federal income tax.
Isn't that also incorrect? It would presumably pay the normal corporate tax on it's profits. It's just that Amazon reinvests it's revenue and thus has no (or little) profit.
Isn't it the workers who (whom? I never know) pay the payroll tax? That's their money, in exchange for their time spent on work, that's not Amazon's money. This doesn't make sense to me.
in USA it works like: pay is $100. then take home is $80 because $20 is taken out for various payroll taxes. then also the company pays $20 for their portion. employees only see the -20 from them, not the +20 from Company on wage stubs.
also, if the company has profits there is some tax on that (well, my little C-corp did)
It's often better for the state to react to private monopolies/oligopolies by entering the space and competing with a bare bones service. This has worked in banking, telecoms, land development, housing, etc. It often works better than taking over the monopoly directly. It's one of the reasons (IMHO) Singapore has such an effective private market.
Often private companies lobby for laws restricting the level that they can compete - this is a signal that it's an effective tactic.
If USPS were given a mandate and the cash it could absolutely build a marketplace that could compete and it would probably kick start Amazon into being a better and cheaper retailer. Unfortunately it's being whittled down to a husk of its former self.
> We should not allow a company to have a share over around 10% of any market. If in a certain field a single dominant company is beneficial for society, that means it is a natural monopoly, and should be served by a regulated utility.
RMS is right about many things but not this one. Competition naturally leads to few companies capturing a market over a long period of time. What's however important is to prevent actively regulatory capture of said markets.
That's going to be impossible if alienating one or two companies can ruin your career in the industry. And that's aside from the fact that regulators will mostly be recruited from those couple of companies, looking for jobs with those companies when they leave, and starting consulting firms and lobbying firms that will be contracting with those couple of companies. Those companies will also have Congress's ear when regulation is discussed because they are donating so much. They are the experts.
either that or the market is a really small specialized market.
on edit: to forestall anyone suggesting I think Amazon has a small market, no, just the Stallman quote doesn't take into account that monopoly can arise in a relatively small market that people would not consider worth nationalizing.
true, as I remember from last year's crises, there is only one wood mill in the world that does a very specific kind of pulp used by 3M to make those notorious masks. I wouldn't nationalize that.
> We should not allow a company to have a share over around 10% of any market.
If a company was already at said 10% limit and you wanted to buy something out of them because to you their offer is by far so much better than any of the alternatives, in your opinion what should happen?
It's not a math equation you run through a computer and get a legal result out the other end. Congress (or whatever) could use this measurement as a tool to drive investigations so you can stomp out anti-competitive behavior before it becomes a problem
> It's not a math equation you run through a computer and get a legal result out the other end.
Not really. This has zero to do with math. At all. We have a buyer and we have a seller, both the buyer and the seller wish to perform a transaction, but then we have a regulator which arbitrarily wants to force them not to execute said transaction because of reasons.
And my question is terribly simple: to those who want to force someone like me from buying what I like from a seller I chose but they arbitrarily reject, how exactly do they wish to force me from buying what I'd like from who I chose to buy from?
No math, no numbers. I'm asking a very simple question: what then?
> No math, no numbers. I’m asking a very simple question: what then?
The comment you replied to answered your question. The transaction goes through, absolutely no additional regulation or control comes into play at the transaction level.
NOTE: I am not supporting this position, or opposing it. I’m just stating what the gp post said.
> The comment you replied to answered your question.
It really didn't, instead it weaseled out by putting up a strawman that pretends to put a loophole in a straight-forward and very clear way.
In fact, it's blatantly clear by itself the fact that no one proposed a single idea or suggestion about how to enforce that mysterious 10%. No explanation was given on the impact on customers, and how the sellers would be forced to not go beyond that 10%. Why is that? Is the idea undefendable?
If they are offering, you buy it. Regulation would affect their legal ability and/or willingness (depending on the style of regulation) to make the offer.
For instance, a regulation addressing this could involve a tax on gross receipts (not profits) in a defined market segment that was 0% at up to 8% share, and 50%×(10 - share in %) above that point.
The price would regulate itself by offer/demand balance and you would still be able to buy it if you can afford it.
With no limits, they can actually create artificial lower prices that competition can’t match, and they become exponentially more powerful and dominating.
And sometimes you end up as a customer having less options and lower quality.
if a company is maxing their sells, don't you think they will raise the price?, and play at a 9%, so there will be always room for new buyers willing to pay the price.
And honestly is hard to debate because it's an vaguely defined hypothetical, I guess we are talking about situations where the state limits how much you can produce.
I think is already happening if you think about Spanish Olive Oil for example, EU limits how much countries can produce, so the price goes up, still everyone that can pay for it can buy it, but at a price that represents the scarcity of it, otherwise you can choose other origin of same product.
I'm really not an expert in these topics, but that's my mental model of it, and I'm not even defend it as I'm not sure it is the optimal, specially the EU way about vegetable production.
> a company is maxing their sells, don't you think they will raise the price?
I said nothing about price. It is irrelevant. I shopped for a product and that particular company had exactly what I want, and they offer it in a way that makes it the absolute best option for my preference. The choice was made. The company wants to sell the product, I want to buy that product from them, but they hit 10% market share. What then? Am I free to buy what I want from who I want to buy it from?
This can happen already to you when products go out of stock, because the company doesn’t have enough capacity to produce, or they underestimate the demand, but after the company makes profit and reinvest in the next batch, they can adjust the price to balance the demand.
It’s not like you are already free to buy whatever you want, there are production limitations, and your budget limitation.
Right now big companies are allowed to give 100x better solutions at fraction of the cost, that makes imposible to other companies to compete and your freedom to buy is just not real, as many times you’ll be obligated to buy from the big fish, being the only alternative.
In the other hand limiting them, they will have to raise the prices and then it would make sense that something 100x more convenient is also more expensive.
Right now we have convenience and low cost, but it’s at the expense of killing smaller business and creating virtual monopolies.
> This can happen already to you when products go out of stock (...)
No, it can't. Your case involves a scenario where no transaction is possible because there is no product to buy or sell. It has zero to do with my very simple and very straight-forward example of a customer wanting to buy a product indeed sold and available and on the store of a seller who already reached its 10% market share.
My example is very clear, and for some reason all proponents of this virtuous 10% market share are either unable or unwilling to step up and either think their idea through or explain how they expect to implement their virtuous idea.
And this is a very simple and straight-forward example: a seller has a product I want to buy, I shopped around and that seller has the absolute best offer, I want to buy the product from that seller, the seller has the product on the counter and I have the cash at hand, but the seller already hit the 10% market share. What then? Is the next step so mysterious that no one can even come close to dare explain what they believe should happen?
You keep asking the same, What then? which leads me to think we are parting from very different scenarios.
Perhaps the difference comes from you thinking in a limit that applies as per number of products sold, and you could find yourself on that situation of "what then?" the product being on the shelve but you are unable to buy it.
I'm thinking in a scenario where the limit is on the production, similar to what I mention before, the EU controlling vegetable productions.
So you don't get to find the product on the shelve if it's already gone but you'll find some other brand, the ones that are better will be more scarce and more pricy as a consequence.
Now, do I want as a consumer that the best things are also cheap and available?, yes! of course!
But the question is, is that sustainable? and what happens to the market when we have this huge player that outcompete everyone else, and dictate the rules, and they are in a position to set the quality standards, long term we might be free to buy just from them under their own rules. Is that freedom?
I'm really not familiar with those proponents of the 10% market, I was just talking from my common sense, I don't think is crazy to put some limits, and we already have some in some industries, for better or worse.
I'm dropping it here, but thanks for sharing your point of view, I'll read you if you reply, always learning and open to change my opinion.
> Most answers are likely exploitative in some way
On what basis are you making a claim like that? Toyota sells roughly as may vehicles in the US a Ford and more than the other manufacturers. Their cars are in many ways better than their competitors qualitatively and often cheaper. Do you think they are exploiting people?
I could keep listing examples of market leaders that offer better products that are more aligned with consumer preferences, but I'm not sure that's going to convince you.
Yes, part of how they achieved this was by violating emissions standards for a decade, something that they've been fined for. I'd be willing to wager they engage in similar practices too.
>I could keep listing examples of market leaders that offer better products that are more aligned with consumer preferences,
Their existence alone won't convince me. You need to answer why the competition is unable to produce similar products at similar prices.
This began well after they entered the market and upset the dominance of established players.
> You need to answer why the competition is unable to produce similar products at similar prices.
The same way some people are better at given task. Many older firms are complacent, and operating on an understanding of the market as it existed in the past. Technology, consumer preferences, commodity prices, and other market conditions are constantly changing. If you see something you competitors don't you can offer better cheaper services. The bigger your competitors are, the slower they are to change course.
At bottom, firms are made up of people who are uniquely skilled and qualified. Better people in better systems will perform better. It can be dead simple sometimes. Firms with happier employees are often more productive.
If you don't understand the basics of competitive advantage, then of course you think companies can only gain an edge by doing something immoral. But this is ultimately sophomoric economic thinking.
>This began well after they entered the market and upset the dominance of established players.
I still find it unlikely that it is an isolated incident, but that decade is also when they started to pass the mentioned 10%.
>But this is ultimately sophomoric economic thinking.
Your attempt to explain why the competition may be unable to compete is "they're just better." Beyond that, you just say smaller is better, which is the point of my argument.
I think what OP means is that amazon is using all the data they have from their storefront to beat everyone in the market, which does seem unfair to me.
I get that, but it doesn't seem any different from any national retailer that sells store brand products along side competitors. I'm not even sure how unique this data is. Every corporation in America has access to relatively detailed data about their competitors' sales. There's a time delay, but know what's selling well is really a small part of executing on go to market strategies.
What does that mean - Investigation of what? By whom? and on what basis/framework? Can you propose something workable?
In any case, there are many reasons a company can offer a better deal - they have invested money and developed a new product/service that the competition cannot simply copy or negotiated a better deal with a supplier, or they're simply a better managed company, or about a million other things businesses can do to gain leverage over competition.
Also, like a closely fought game - the advantage could just be temporary. These things are very fluid.
As much I dislike Stallman's outreach "strategies" and general public efforts, I'll freely admit he's been right a LOT. The problem is that no one will listen to him because he's an ass about it. I imagine he thinks himself a modern day Cassandra...
Even if he is right a lot (not a point I'm conceding by any stretch), why pick such an asinine thing as "11% market share means we should treat this market as a regulated utility?" It's an extremely fringe belief, which is saying something given the source.
I think Stallman has been having a relevant point here[1], worth to mention, a philosophical one if you will, which is the question: should technology keep progressing as fast as possible because is convenient no matter what’s price ?
That’s the background discussion where I think Stallman has a point, I heard this from him years ago regarding Facebook and privacy, and that was before all the scandals.
I disagree. There are more and more services providing logistics, delivery, payments, etc. And they are quite reliable. Just 2 years ago I was entirely relying on Amazon as a good ecommerce. As of 2020/2021, to be honest, there is nearly no difference with some individual retailers (which don't use a 3rd party platform to sell their goods like Amazon or Ebay). Lots of websites have improved, logistics, delivery, customer service, payments, ..etc etc. They key, in my opinion, was the logistics + delivery. That's what Amazon was exceptionally good at. Now that the infrastructure is nearly the same for everyone, why would you share your profits with Amazon and risk to be out of the business in 1-2 years?
What are the Amazon level logistics and delivery service that is available to a smaller retailer? I see some nascent choices but they really aren’t that close.
Seriously, though. Between reselling and 'owner/operator businesses' (read: pyramid schemes selling oils, scents, candles, and makeup), the local farmer's market is just an absolute train wreck anymore.
Local farmers who used to sell at the farmer's market have moved to subscription boxes, from what I can tell.
Why should the federal government steal Amazon? Surely, it is possible for the government to build another service. I will admit that this is a clever way to kill Amazon. I find the idea of a government running my compute infrastructure to be a terrifyingly bad idea and would seek out someone else.
Whenever someone suggests that something be nationalized, I ask myself "Why not create a public version of it?". If the answer is "it cannot compete with the private ones", maybe that's why running it privately is necessary.
Just look at how well this works out for every town trying to set up its own broadband when Comcast and others fail to invest. Lawsuits raining down for every possible reason, shared public resources blocked for months, misinformation campaigns to convince people that public broadband is a waste of their money and anyone involved in it should be kicked from their office.
Its like competing in a five hundred meter sprint if the winner of the last twenty races had a shotgun. His time sucks, but he doesn't need to actually run as long as nobody else makes it to the finishing line.
Amazon doesn't need to be nationalized, it does need to be broken up though. The dividing lines in the organization are so clear you could practically tap it with a hammer and it will fall apart into nice individual pieces.
Amazon is far from only being software atleast in India.
They've such a volume here in India that since Amazon has got here, traditional LTL logistics soared in price wayyy higher
Amazon has completely revolutionised logistics here in India, you'll have hard time sending a box from point A to point B cheaper than what Amazon offers.
We are at a point where Amazon sells things much cheaper shipped to your door than a shop near you. (If you don't live in a metro city highly likely, the price which Amazon offers, local shops simply can't beat them)
And in India something like 60-70% people live in small towns and villages, traditional family owned distribution networks are failing to compete with Amazon, yes the ones which power most of the shops in the town.
I maintain, the traditional family owned distribution networks were even more exploitative (screwing over both customers and their workers) in India atleast compared to what Amazon offers.
Amazon delivery agent here are guys from low economic class and often from villages nearby. I am glad my purchases are helping these people survive than the "several property owning shopkeeper near me" competing with me in the real estate market while simultaneously ripping me off on the price on various tools.
Few years ago I was working for such family owned distribution networks and I never seen such miseries in life, truckers were often not paid at time, often driving trucks which hardly get any service (dangerously), the axel could become rocket anytime while on road. Amazon has only brought best practises to us, they've regular vehicle maintenance schedule, drivers get paid on time. Amazon delivery agents are some of the happiest people I've met despite working so hard, they are always smiling while delivering stuff to me.
The distribution agents were regularly fired without payment (it's not completely organized sector so lots of labor operate in grey area, where if they don't get paid don't have any legal recourse and most likely no one will believe if they ever worked for the person they are claiming to have rendered their service to. I am glad, the nepotistic and exploitative power nexus of family owned distribution networks is dying.
Easy return was never available in India, and you risked getting "death stares" from the shopkeeper if you ever returned anything to him because of quality issues of the product.
Other than this, most of the times I had seen "young girls" walking into market and getting "40% discount" by some thristy shopkeeper and they wouldn't do same for a guy ever, atleast this form of descrimination is dying with Amazon.
And honestly speaking, if a lot of Amazon executives in Bangalore and Gurgaon are getting rich, it's well deserved for what they've done for the nation.
I forgot to mention, we've many Amazon competitors but primarily Flipkart - well, getting them to replace/return anything has been tough for me, maybe because I live in a small town, I don't say but I get all my packages in 2 days from Amazon (without prime), while Flipkart takes 5 days here minimum.
What would I like to see Amazon change?
1. Make it possible to sell low value items which cost less than 200 and aggregate it before it's shipped to customer and charge customer shipping on aggregate weight shipped for these small combines. Sometimes it's very difficult when you've to order small items and pay 150-200 shipping on each item. These can be "no return combine", I will not bother returning such low value item, so Amazon saves overhead and additional costs.
2. Please revolutionze hardware space for retail buyers, stuff like "steel sheets, MDF, nail, bolts, nuts" - we don't have any Homedepot or Lowe's, we really need it and my hope is only on Amazon. Other countries like US has Homedepot where u can get most of the hardware fittings while this space is seriously lagging in India, everyone uses different naming for a spare part, etc...we don't even have anything like "McMasterCarr".
Right, but there's a self-correction here, which is that Accenture gets fired if they do a bad job. The govt has a monopoly and so there's little self-correction - too many layers of indirection between the everyday voter and Amazon's outcome.
Through multiple layers of indirection and obfuscation. A democratic vote every 4 years is noisy when it pertains to one specific outcome (say, Amazon's performance right now) since that vote also contains information for numerous unrelated things. Private ownership means a very tight feedback loop between performance and governance.
It's basically why collective ownership of complicated things has never worked. Except for perhaps the army, which costs an absolute fortune.
>"It's basically why collective ownership of complicated things has never worked"
Except also the roads, railroads, airports, ports, oil pipelines, nuclear weapons and reactors, GPS and weather satellites, chunks of the energy grid, NASA, a national postal service, social security numbers, and so on
Which proves my point. Look at the innovation that SpaceX has created with VTOL rockets. If it was left purely up to nationalized bodies this would have never happened (or maybe, it would have taken 50-100 years). The incentives and desire for economic efficiency just simply aren't there. Government wants flashy one-off wins that generate publicity and votes, if it wastes a few billion and doesn't scale there isn't any consternation. The entire mindset top to bottom is completely inconsistent with VTOL rockets.
> roads, railroads, airports, ports, GPS,
The argument for these being nationalized is that these are goods that are prone to natural monopoly and some of those are largely non-excludable in the case of roads.
None of those arguments apply to Amazon. eBay is a substitute for marketplace, Azure is a substitute for AWS, etc.
These are also much simpler than Amazon. Could a government have created AWS? Could a government create an iPhone? It's a rhetorical question because all know that the answer is no. Even if they could in terms of capability, they won't because the incentives aren't right. And if they tried, they'd do it incredibly inefficiently and be outcompeted in am embarrassing fashion by a private alternative (e.g. eBay), with the difference being subsidized by the taxpayer.
> nuclear weapons
In the case of nukes, the argument is that the government has a monopoly on force (which is also why the army should be nationalized).
And I already conceded that the army was well-run, although at a ridiculous level of cost (which is another byproduct of nationalization).
Heavily subsidize car use, incentivizing urban sprawl and carbon emissions. Repairs take too long. Design is convoluted.
> railroads
Usually privately owned
> Airports
TSA
> Ports
Jones Act
> Oil pipelines
Usually privately owned
> nuclear weapons
Oh yeah, what a great thing to have around. Really provide a service to citizens.
> nuclear reactors
Often privatized
> national postal service
Junk mail. Also, have you heard of the American Letter Mail Company? They competed so well, the government essentially banned competition in the letter delivery space.
> social security numbers
Insecure, easy abusable. Not meant for identification, but used for that anyways.
> Secondly, that isn’t what sellers want. Many sellers use Amazon to fulfill their orders. Amazon is far more than just a “market stall”.
This.
Amazon is basically a huge logistics network. Their business is not selling you products, whether from their own generic brands, from high-end Veblen goods companies like Apple or from cheap chinese dropship artists. Their business is to process payment, and get that package delivered to your front door. To Amazon, their products is just a way to generate output through their logistics network.
I find that UK and USA governments are worse at IT than Russia and Czech Republic. Maybe it's age of the lawmakers, or over-reliance on old sustem, I dont know
Every time a business gets this successful someone will inevitably come out of the woodwork and say "the government now needs to own this, there is no other option" - wat?
Interop requirements may serve better than direct government control.
At the very least, it’s worth being clear eyed with respect to the quality of government run services.
What would be necessary for the government to run a service like Amazon successfully? Is our government today capable of doing such a thing? I think the answer is clearly no.
With that critical truth that you've touched on said... American civilian resident-facing government services tend to be organized and run with all the strong incentives being to make it good for everyone but the residents. Usually the workforce has a strong union and management has their goals, but us users have no strong force to exert except distant oversight in the form of Congress.
Some organizations escape this. Others do so partially at best. Most do not. State DMVs are notorious pits of utter misery, and this is generally an honest reflection of experience.
You can report a passport lost online, but you have to file a DS-11 in black ink at a post office to request a new one. This process can be easy or hard unpredictably, depending mainly on how nice the postal worker feels that day. There are few to no organizational incentives towards better customer service.
Why black ink? Because the State Department says so. And they don't have to care what you think.
Idk if USPS is truly an example of excellence, even if they are an example of govt excellence. In 2020 they shipped 70 billion packages, of which 90% was spam.
They do police package contents to a degree, but only for actual crimes. Postal spam isn't a crime (and probably shouldn't be, as much as I'd like to get rid of the spam).
They do police package contents, pretty heavily even. They allow spam (presorted bulk mail in post office terms) because the spammers have a strong lobby.
Aliexpress is Ebay, not amazon. That being said, both feature a decent return policy, shitty and invariably wrong item description, no ability to properly filter goods and fake reviewes.
The only dailight I see between them is the shipoing time and language.
You said "X would be great" but didn't explain why, so a response like "No, X would be bad" is equally lacking in details. Its hard to discuss anything without an underlying basis for the conversation. There is no precedent for the US government providing services comparable to Amazon at comparable cost/benefit.
I explained why, commercial goods and services would have a safe sponsored forum to sell their wares without worrying about a profit hungry giant measuring their success, cloning their business and driving them to bankruptcy.
You have identified a goal, which is a great start, and is definitely worth considering. However, I see a few gaps when connecting the dots. At present, there is nothing stopping one vendor from cloning another vendors products and services and marketing them outside of Amazon. So many products these days are just white-label goods made in China and rebranded elsewhere. Also, should the government really be in involved in managing logistics, storing and shipping smartphones and sneakers all over the world? I don't see this as the best use of our tax-dollars.
Amtrak is great. I generally like government-run services. Have you tried dealing with your local cable monopoly? It's a nightmare -- why not get the government involved so things work more smoothly and there is more competition?
As far as I can tell, just as often. No, I don't have the same expectations, but that is more than reasonable considering Amazon has an easier job (every seller already has there product in an Amazon warehouse, as is the USPS has an additional processing step).
Good point. In my last apartment, Amazon threatened to stop delivering to the entire (large) complex because their delivery people failed so hard at delivering. Packages were left just about everywhere and the Facebook group became more like a lost-and-found package site. Something that didn't happen at all with USPS.
>Give them the municipal software infrastructure they need to do so and maintain it as a public good.
oof. Amazons actual website is frankly horrible, but i shudder to think how terrible it would be if it was run by the government. I'm cringing at the thought. There would just be an endless stream of news about gross mismanagement, incompetence, wasting taxpayers money ad nuseaum. No. The only thing that could possibly be worse then Amazon in its current format would be if it were run as a government enterprise.
And to the whataboutism; "who says Amazon doesn't have those problems etc, it's different. I don't have to be bothered so much by the internal affairs of a private company. A government company otoh, it would just be all over the news.
I agree but there's one practical problem with this: other markets (e.g. the EU) need to nationalize or reproduce it too or else the US is getting significant geopolitical leverage.
If the US nationalized Amazon, I think you can be pretty sure that other countries would also nationalize their local Amazon divisions (ie. Amazon FR would become property of the french government)
Why would they repeat the US's mistakes immediately after watching it blow up on the US? People have agency and the response to a sudden theft by the government for being too successful would be to get the hell out of there as the US is no longer stable. The other subsidiaries wouldn't surrender ownership to a distant bandit government just like all of the other times it happened.
Everybody but communists know that Nationalization is a goddamned terrible idea doomed to failure - you can see it by not being in their political platforms at all. Only those with dogmas to consider the action a goal in itself advocate for it.
All these 3rd party companies want is a "farmers market", a stall to sell their wares. Give them the municipal software infrastructure they need to do so and maintain it as a public good.