Enlight 21

How Amazon Gobbles Up Small Businesses

The way Amazon competes and the power of its monopoly are seldom highlighted in the media. Elizabeth Warren mentions it frequently as the reason why breaking up big tech is important, because the “winner take all” monopolies like Facebook, Apply, Google, and Amazon depresses competition, stifles innovation, and contribute mightily to the extreme income inequality that plagues the U.S.

Warren’s basic point is that if a company owns a dominant “platform” that many small businesses must use in order to sell their products, it means that the platform owner has access to data about how popular certain products are. This, in Amazon’s case, has resulted in Amazon selling its own copycat products under “private labels,’ thereby competing with the companies selling such products and before long, Amazon owns the market for that product! (more).

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-19/amazon-uses-search-to-undercut-small-businesses-on-its-site