Amazon, Google, and Apple have moved past monopoly status to competing directly with governments… and winning

in #government4 years ago

US Senator Josh Hawley is demanding a criminal antitrust probe of Amazon as the e-commerce behemoth’s powers grow to rival the government’s own. Google and Apple, too, are now ordering governments around.

Amazon “abuses its position as an online platform and collects detailed data about merchandise so Amazon can create copycat products under an Amazon brand,” Hawley charged in a letter he sent to US Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday. The senator (R-MO) demanded a criminal probe of the e-commerce giant, accusing it of engaging in “predatory and exclusionary data practices to build and maintain a monopoly” – a textbook violation of antitrust law.

Charging that Amazon has gained unprecedented monopoly power through the sheer wealth of data it has collected on its users, allowing it to clone sellers’ products and undercut them on price, the senator likened the company’s “capacity for data collection” to “a brick and mortar retailer attaching a camera to every customer’s forehead.” With the coronavirus pandemic forcing the lion’s share of commerce online, Amazon has assumed near-omnipotence.

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Solution: Get rid of governments and these corporations won't have any power.

Try to boycott the big companies (Amazon,Google,Apple,Microsoft)
as a conscious consumer.
Support local/regional/national business. Just the other day i "worked around" it,
and got what i want for the same price ;)

These companies have been sanctioned by governments for their privacy. They now also punish revenge governments that want to collect data.