California Attorney General Rob Bonta last night filed a request for a preliminary injunction in California’s existing case against Amazon for price fixing. Attorney General Bonta’s 2022 lawsuit alleged that the company stifled competition and caused increased prices across California through its anticompetitive policies in order to avoid competing on price with other retailers. New evidence paints a clearer and more shocking picture. The motion for a preliminary injunction comes after a robust discovery process where California uncovered evidence of countless interactions in which Amazon, vendors, and Amazon’s competitors agree to increase and fix the prices of products on other retail websites to bolster Amazon’s profits. Time and again, across years and product categories, Amazon has reached out to its vendors and instructed them to increase retail prices on competitors’ websites, threatening dire consequences if vendors do not comply. Vendors, bullied by Amazon’s overwhelming bargaining leverage and fearing punishment, comply — agreeing to raise prices on competitors’ websites (often with the awareness and cooperation of the competing retailer), or to remove products from competing websites altogether. Amazon’s goal is to insulate itself from price competition by preventing lower retail prices in the market at the expense of American consumers who are already struggling with a crisis of affordability.
I’ve pointed out Valve doing basically the same thing; games can’t be priced lower than Steam on competing game storefronts (not Steam key resellers), or Valve will threaten to delist your game. Which would be essentially kill it. And they obviously do this to protect their chunky store fee.
But personal loyalty goes a long way.
I’m trying to reframe the perspective here, not drag into an argument about Valve. A whole lot of people feel good about finding “deals” on Amazon, about Amazon services that have helped them, and especially about the value and convenience the whole platform provides. It’s easy for Lemmy to hate on Amazon, but for the average person, I think this is a harder sell than most of us realize. They’ll dismiss it as the “market working” or California sensationalism or, more likely, just filter it out as noise in their feed, just like most PC gamers would when they read something bad about Valve.
The Valve example sounds similar, but I think Amazon is comparably more nefarious:
Amazon has a few different tiers for sellers, but in general, they charge:
Valve is kind enough to offer free promotion on the home page (if your game is popular, or has a sale), and digital games are much easier to scale, versus manufacturing and holding physical inventory. They also do a lot of nefarious shit (loot boxes…), but I’d argue at least their partners aren’t being squeezed quite as much.
This is exactly my point; it’s easy to jump in and defend Valve for their good points when, at the end of the day, they take a third of all profits for themselves and have a pseudo monopoly with their platform, just to start.
One can make similar positive points about Amazon, about how much they can save retailers and consumers, especially before they enshittified so significantly.
I boycott pretty much all the big corporations. I can’t really boycott Amazon because I am in a super rural part of the US and run a small business. Like most small businesses I purchase a lot of random doodads and thingamabobbers from china. Amazons monopoly on the US post office and their logistic network that gets bulk goods from china to my house is hard to live without. They fix more than prices, the whole economy is stacked in their favor. They basically won globalism and it was bad for the globe.
Valves scope is much smaller and less destructive. They keep their customers due to loyalty and the investment into a steam library.
Yeah…
That’s how Amazon worked. At first.
Back then, online shopping kind of sucked, and this little book store company made its so streamlined I got invested.
Valve’s not a good guy, but your attempt to “reframe the perspective” is lacking a major detail. If amazon were to simply GIVE you the product after you’ve paid the competitor then it’s quite a different story… yet that’s what steam will do.
Since when does steam just give away games just because you bought them from another storefront?
I think they’re talking about Steam key resellers, which I wasn’t referencing. That’s a whole other thing (and can indeed be priced lower than the main storefront, with some complications IIRC).