The fact that a business can't sell to a large proportion of households if it's not on Amazon gives Amazon near-total power over that business. Amazon uses that power to demand discounts and charge junk fees to the businesses that rely on it. This allows it to lower prices, which brings in more customers, which means that even more businesses have to do business with Amazon to stay afloat:

vimeo.com/739486256/00a0a7379a

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Chokepoint Capitalism extended video (US edition)

This is "Chokepoint Capitalism extended video (US edition)" by Law Digital (Studio) on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

^Vimeo

That's Amazon's version, anyway. In reality, it's a lot scuzzier. Amazon doesn't just demand deep discounts from its suppliers - it demand *unsustainable* discounts from them. For example, Amazon targeted small publishers with a program called the "Gazelle Project." Jeff Bezos told his negotiators to bring down these publishers "the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle":

archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs…

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A New Book Portrays Amazon as Bully

At Amazon, a negotiation is not considered successful if both sides benefit, according to “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.” Amazon must win it all.

^{Bits Blog}

The idea was to get a bunch of cheap books for the Kindle to help it achieve critical mass, at the expense of driving these publishers out of business. They were a kind of disposable rocket stage for Amazon.

Deep discounts aren't the only way that Amazon feeds off its suppliers: it also lards junk-fee atop junk-fee. For every pound Amazon makes from its customers, it rakes in 45-51p in fees:

pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aet…

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Now, just like there's no business that can survive losing 30% of its sales overnight, there's also no business that can afford to hand 45-51% of its gross margin to a retailer. For businesses to survive at all on Amazon, they have to jack their prices up - *way* up. However, Amazon has an anticompetitive deal called "most favoured nation status" that forces suppliers to sell their goods on Amazon at the same price as they sell them elsewhere (even from their own stores).

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So when companies raise their prices in order to pay ransom to Amazon, they have to raise their prices everywhere. Far from being a force for low prices, Amazon makes prices go up *everywhere*, from the big Tesco's to the corner shop:

pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/gre…

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Amazon makes so much money off of this scam that it doesn't have to pay *anything* to ship its own goods - the profits from overcharging merchants for "fulfillment by Amazon" pay for *all* the shipping, on *everything* Amazon sells:

cdn.ilsr.org/wp-content/upload…

Amazon competes with its own sellers, but unlike those sellers, it doesn't have to pay a 45-51% rake - and it can make its competitor-customers cover the full cost of its own shipping!

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On top of that, Amazon maintains the pretense that its headquarters are in Luxembourg, a tax- and crime-haven, and pays a fraction of the taxes that British businesses pay to HMRC (and that's not counting the 45-51% tax they pay to Jeff Bezos's monoposony).

That's not the only way that Amazon unfairly competes with British businesses, though: Amazon uses its position as a middleman between buyers and sellers to identify the most successful products sold by its own customers.

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Then it copies those products and sells them below the original inventor's costs (because it gets free shipping, pays no tax, and doesn't have to pay its own junk fees), and drives those businesses into the ground. Even Jeff "Project Gazelle" Bezos seems to understand that this is a bad look, which is why he perjured himself to the American Congress when he was questioned under oath about it:

bbc.com/news/business-58961836

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Amazon's Jeff Bezos 'may have lied to Congress'

Top lawmakers say Mr Bezos and other Amazon executives may have misled them about the firm's business practices.

^{BBC News}

Amazon then places its knockoff products above the original goods on its search results page. Amazon makes $38b selling off placement on these search pages, and the top results for an Amazon search aren't the best matches for your query - they're the ones that pay the most. On average, Amazon's top result for a search is 29% more expensive than the best match on the site. On average, the top row of results is 25% more expensive than the best match on the site.

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On average, Amazon buries the best result for your search 17 places down the results page:

pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/sub…

Amazon, in other words, acts like the business regulator for the economies it dominates. It decides what can be sold, and at what prices. It decides whose products come up when you search, and thus which businesses deserve to live and which ones deserve to die.

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An economy dominated by Amazon isn't a market economy - it's a planned economy, run by Party Secretary Bezos to benefit Amazon's shareholders.

Now, there *is* a role for a business regulator, because some businesses really *don't* deserve to live (they sell harmful products, engage in deceptive practices, etc). The UK has a regulator that's in charge of this stuff: the Competition and Markets Authority, which is now going to be run by Jeff Bezos's hand-picked UK Amazon boss.

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That means that Amazon is now both the official and the unofficial central planner of the UK economy, with a free hand to raise prices, lower quality, and destroy British businesses, while hiding its profits in Luxemourg and starving the exchequer of taxes.

The "first buddy" role that Keir Starmer just handed over to Jeff Bezos is, in every way, more generous than the first buddy deal Trump gave Elon Musk.

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Starmer's government claims they're doing this for "growth" but Amazon isn't a force for growth, it's force for extraction. It is a notorious underpayer of its labour force, a notorious tax-cheat, and a world-beating destroyer of local economies, local jobs, and local tax bases. Contrary to Amazon's own self-mythologizing, it doesn't deliver lower prices - it raises prices throughout the economy.

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It doesn't improve quality - this is a company whose algorithmic recommendation system failed to recognize that an "energy drink" was actually its own drivers' bottled piss, which it then promoted until it was the best-selling energy drink on the platform:

pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/rel…

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There's a reason that the UK, the EU, Japan and South Korea found it so easy to collaborate on antitrust cases against American companies: these are all countries whose competition law was rewritten by American technocrats during the Marshall Plan, modeled on the US's own laws.

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The bedrock of US competition law is 1890's Sherman Act, whose author, Senator John Sherman, declared that:

> If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.

pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-…

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