From a conservative standpoint, the problem with Big Tech is the censorship. Big Tech and its media defenders will argue that antitrust law wasn’t built to defend speech. Much as they insist that civil rights wasn’t built to protect affiliation. We can argue with that, but there’s no arguing that the easiest antitrust killshot for Big Tech is demonstrating that they’re setting prices.
The Justice Department under Barr and GOP State AGs were turning up solid evidence of that sort of thing in the ad market with Google and Facebook. The resulting stories in the Wall Street Journal got very little coverage.
But the ad market can seem like a remote issue to most.
Here’s a very Democratic AG going after Amazon on consumer price rigging.
Racine is making the claim that Amazon isn’t just crushing competitors, but *raising* consumer prices in the process.
It’s a longstanding claim by some of the independent merchants who sell on Amazon’s digital mall that the company punishes them if they list their products for less on their own websites or other shopping sites like Walmart.com. Those sellers are effectively saying that Amazon dictates what happens on shopping sites all over the internet, and in doing so makes products more expensive for all of us.
Matt Stoller, who is a lefty, then goes off on free shipping. Never mind that though.
That kind of ‘lock-in’ isn’t unique. Pretty much every Big Tech market leader has some version of this same trick. Lock up the marketplace and then prevent anyone from using your marketplace if they sell elsewhere at a lower price.
This is the case with app stores. It’s come up with Epic’s lawsuit against Apple. Price fixing was very much an issue with the Google and Facebook ad shenanigans. It’s come up with Steam. Market leaders don’t want to be undercut and so they set the floor price.
A basic problem with suing Amazon though is that it has more competition in the retail space than Google or Facebook have in theirs. A narrow lawsuit dealing with, say, eBooks, would be much more promising.
But it’s another shot. Big Tech can crush nearly any individual government lawsuit, even at the federal level, but enough lawsuits drain even its power.
The problem with the Democrat lawsuits is that they’re generally shakedown suits. They don’t want to break up Big Tech. They want to cash in.
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