"Big tech has responded to the mammoth antitrust report put out by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee yesterday with blanket denials there’s any monopolistic behaviour or competitive imbalances to see here.
Below is a quick run down of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google’s rebuttals.
Among the committee’s (many) recommendations are structural separations and prohibitions on certain dominant platforms from operating in adjacent lines of business; interoperability and data portability requirements; non-discrimination requirements and a ban on self-preferencing; and beefed up merger and monopolization enforcement, as well as better administration of antitrust laws.
Amazon
In a lengthy but punchy blog post the ecommerce giant brands the committee’s views on antitrust “fringe notions” and “regulatory spitballing” — lathering on dire predictions of doom for small business and hoards of inflated-price-enraged consumers should lawmakers deign to dabble in any “misguided interventions”.
Sample quote:
The flawed thinking would have the primary effect of forcing millions of independent retailers out of online stores, thereby depriving these small businesses of one of the fastest and most profitable ways available to reach customers. For consumers, the result would be less choice and higher prices. Far from enhancing competition, these uninformed notions would instead reduce it.
The substance of Amazon’s argument against the need for antitrust intervention is the top-line claim that retail is “thriving and extraordinarily competitive” — with the tech giant saying it accounts for a tiny fraction of global retail and isn’t even the largest US retailer by revenues (that’s Walmart). Among the grab-bag of competitors Amazon lists as evidence that it’s a mere retail minnow are Best Buy, Costco, Facebook, Kroger, Google Shopping, Home Depot, Shopify and Target. (It doesn’t mention Whole Foods because it already consumed that competitor.)
The strategy here is to claim online and offline retail are just one giant market — because of course if lawmakers slice by online retail alone there’s no denying Amazon’s oversized punch.
Another chunk of rebuttal is against what it claims is “false narrative” that its own interests don’t align with “the thousands of small and medium-sized businesses thriving as sellers in our store”.
“The opposite is true: Amazon and sellers complement each other, and together we create a better customer experience than either could create alone,” it pouts, before going on to say SME sales account for around 60% of all physical products sold on its marketplace, and that it “typically” makes the same or more revenue on third-party sales — rubbishing the idea there could possibly be any conflict of interest at all from Amazon also selling own brand rival products on the same marketplace where only Amazon gets an overview of merchants’ data.
NB: European regulators aren’t so convinced about the lack of competitive risks on dual-sided platforms.
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