> Think of Amazon is a search engine for products.

> [Amazon's] own purchasing arm

...so we can't think of Amazon as just "a search engine", right?

You might as well hand someone a toy and say "Think of this as a toy gun. But this is where it gets a bit more complicated: 40% of these have a trigger that shoots bullets." Whom are you kidding?

Clearly with the scheme you described, these are morally two separate entities colluding with each other to use each others' huge powers in the market to raise prices and pocket more profit for themselves.

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binarysolo 11 hours ago | parent [-]

That is probably part of the court case: does Amazon.com searches favor VC purchasing in any way, shape, or form. This would require disclosure of their algorithm weights and what not, which they would then need to redact so people can't reverse engineer their algos to SEO Amazon's search.

My understanding is they got caught with this in the mid 2010s and as a result had to come very clean on some of this inter-departmental stuff. Most people who've worked at/with Amazon know its fief-like bureaucracy and clean delineation of business units (as both a strength and a weakness), so I'd be curious if there was more to it.

Then the other question would be: if you run a system that has certain emergent behaviors coming from it, without direct collusion -- how much would you be on the hook for various things that do end up happening? It makes sense that Amazon search wants lowest prices on Amazon, and it makes sense that Amazon VC wants margin, so when the two effects result in price inflation is that Amazon's problem.

IANAL

	▲	ang_cire 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You don't actually have to directly communicate with someone in order to collude, you just have to both be knowingly working towards that same end (tacit collusion). https://www.winston.com/en/blogs-and-podcasts/competition-co... But that's aside from the ridiculousness of suggesting that BUs are so independent that their actions aren't being viewed in total by the shared management they both report to. ELT at Amazon is responsible for the outcomes of their BUs, negative ones included, whether the individual BU leaders 'knew' what those outcomes would be or not. In fact, that's literally how it's supposed to work; ELT directs strategic outcomes from the top.
	▲	friendzis 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		IANAL. In cases like this I like to suggest to remember Microsoft's case with IE bundling. The mere act of using monopolistic power of one arm of the business is enough to trigger anti-monopoly laws. Hiding listings that are found cheaper elsewhere would be very much suspect under these laws.