“We tend to think of Amazon as a retailer… but Amazon is a company that’s after controlling the underlying infrastructure of the economy.”
That’s just one of the points ILSR’s Stacy Mitchell made in a recent interview with Chris Hayes, the journalist and author whose show “All In with Chris Hayes” airs weeknights on MSNBC. Their conversation took place at Winter Institute 2017, an annual conference hosted by the American Booksellers Association, in front of a live audience of independent booksellers and publishing industry leaders.
In this 45-minute recording of their conversation, Mitchell and Hayes discuss Amazon’s power as an online platform, the importance of competition and a diverse ecology of businesses for a healthy economy, and the need for a public policy response to the company’s growing dominance.
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This ILSR report finds that Amazon is exploiting its gatekeeper power to impose huge fees on the third-party sellers that rely on its marketplace.
How Amazon uses its monopoly power to extract extreme and rapidly growing fees from businesses on their site that have little choice to reach customers.
Amazon claims that it has “a mutually beneficial relationship” with the small businesses that depend on its platform. This fact sheet tells the real story.