Is it time to break up Amazon.com? Here's how it gets done

Let’s get this over with first: It’s an understatement to say consumers love shopping on Amazon.com. “We encourage anyone to compare our pay and benefits to other retailers.” Regarding allegation that Amazon uses seller’s data to compete against them, the spokesperson said in the email that Amazon has “the same information any retailer, online or offline, would have about the items sold in its store,” and that “information such as Best Sellers, Movers and Shakers, Recommendations, and Reviews are publically available.” Regarding its pursuit of state and local incentives, like tax abatements and other credits, Amazon has said it’s making use of incentives offered to all companies by local governments and that, in 2016, the company created 3,600 direct and 2,400 indirect jobs in each of 44 cities with populations of less than one million people. In the paper titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” Khan argues that this laser focus on “consumer welfare” makes U.S. antitrust regulators “unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy.” Amazon’s size and clout has led to calls by some for antitrust authorities to take a longer, harder look at the company’s fundamental business model, and to consider historical precedents for intervention, including the railroad trusts of the late 1800s that led to the first Supreme Court ruling supporting the U.S. federal government’s right to regulate private enterprise that impacts the public interest. “And people will say, ‘but Amazon only controls 50 percent of the U.S. market for e-commerce.’ And I think the thing we have to look at isn’t that the bar for this is Amazon controlling 100 percent of the market for e-commerce, or 90 percent of the market for e-commerce.” A company representative said Amazon controls less than four percent of U.S. retail and less than one percent of the market globally. “In every one of the businesses that you describe, we have incredible competition.” What Wilke is basically saying here is that while Amazon’s has a lot of online business segments — from selling books and gadgets to providing cloud services to companies worldwide — there is no single segment in which Amazon has an unfair competitive edge.