This is sad, but true. And true for other giant companies, not just for Amazon - Meta/Facebook is another good example.

What can we do about it? Not much. This is something that happens when in a "free" market you have a near monopoly, and the antitrust is too weak to even try to fine these companies.

One might think that there's a "conspiracy" of a few powerful people / billionaires, but I don't believe it it the case. Individuals are driven by results, profits, targets, metrics, etc... The company as a whole responds to shareholders, not the small retail one but large funds and such that own a significant stake in these companies. They want to make money. They lobby the government to make sure that quasi-monopolies like this one can go on undisturbed.

I don't blame Amazon. I think this is a limitation of the (supposedly) free-market society in which we live. By the way, it is not a free market when antitrust does not work, or when you need to bail-out banks, etc.

I admire and respect Seth Godin (I even met him once, years ago), and I would love to see if he had any idea of how to solve this.

It's eminently solvable. Make the practice illegal. Or break up big companies. Or you progressively tax on revenue, so it becomes increasingly inefficient to a mega corporation. Or require companies above a certain size become increasingly worker owned.

Amazon doesn't need to be so big and in so many industries. My pharmacy doesn't also need to be a movie studio. My cloud provider doesn't also need to be a self publishing business. It distorts too many things.

> What can we do about it? Not much.

You should do what I do: look for someplace else to buy from first. Amazon has "everything" - if you can find it. However there are usually small sellers of that niche (often niche.com) where they know something about the product and will direct your to the best one without adds. The smaller/weirder the niche the more likely this seller is to be helpful. You get to support "the little guy", and get a good product for a good price. Even if Amazon is cheaper, the smaller store is still the better value because you get a good product.

I don’t give Amazon my money, that’s something most people have the agency to do. There are many, many other places to order from on the internet.

The ads make sense in capitalism. Without the described effect products would never change. Payment for ads ensures discovery works in adversarial free market.

The problem is that the pay for that goes to Amazon instead of your pockets. I think Brave was actually on to something.