What can and should be done, not just about Amazon, but about the Amazonification of America, where ever larger conglomerates have pushed out competitors, pushed up prices, and taken over the entire economy?
ILSR’s Co-Executive Director Stacy Mitchell joins David Sirota and Arjun Singh on Lever Time to dive into the history of why the government allowed so many companies, particularly Amazon, to become monopolies and how regulators can break up the giant conglomerates.
“The government went after companies like A&P, the big retail chain of its day. The government went after AT&T and IBM and got them to open up their patent vaults. And so suddenly, things like the transistor, which would later lead to the computer revolution and the web, were released into the wild. It was a period in which we had this broader prosperity and innovation,” Mitchell explains.
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Amazon maintains its monopoly power in part thanks to AI-driven pricing systems that monitor the cost of everything, often leading to higher prices for consumers.
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