New unsealed records reveal Amazon's price-fixing tactics, California AG claims

worik

Unsurprising Did Amazon think they were too big to convict? I wonder if they will meet the fate of Standard Oil, back in the day.

trollbridge

Amazon would be smart to settle with no admission of wrongdoing and an agreement to seal documents lest every other state end up following suit.

fmajid

At this point, Antitrust law is no longer the right statute for prosecution. RICO is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...

lelandfe

If you've ever seen those "Click To Reveal Price" or "Price Only Revealed At Checkout" products online, this here is one reason why. They help businesses keep discounted prices hidden from Amazon's crawlers.

SilverElfin

We need all new antitrust laws. The size of these companies is itself a problem. They have so much power that there is no possibility for fair competition. Maybe we can start by taxing companies that are worth more than 1 trillion at an extremely high rate.

ggreer

It's odd that this is a request for a preliminary injunction considering that the case is almost four years old. Both the 2022 and the new filing are heavily censored[1][2], so I can't know for sure, but I didn't notice any revelation in the latest filing. Amazon requires that anyone selling through their platform not offer lower prices elsewhere online. If a seller does so, they'll be relegated to the "New & pre-owned" offers section below the "Add to cart" & "Buy it now" buttons. This has been the case since at least 2019. (This also means that if you're shopping on Amazon and want a better deal, you should check the other offers section for a cheaper price.) Lots of retailers (both physical & online) have similar requirements, and many manufacturers have similar requirements for minimum advertised prices (such as Apple). I think the California AG's plan is to argue that the pricing rules combined with Amazon's large market share merit a judgement against them, but it's going to be an uphill battle to single out one company for practices that are common to the industry. 1. https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/2022-... 2. https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/REDAC...

reenorap

How is this not a complete violation of anti-trust laws? If the federal government won't pursue it (questionable in this environment), surely there's more than enough to go after it state-by-state. And can't we do a class-action lawsuit against Amazon at this point?

jmyeet

The entire use case of dynamic pricing is to raise prices. Airlines were really the first to do this but there it kinda makes sense. You have a plane. It's going anyway. You want to fill it. At the other extreme is RealPage, which is explicitly designed to raise rents and it's used by enough people that you can view it as the last frontier of anti-trust, anticompetitive behavior and price-fixing. It's also state-sanctioned violence because your price-fixing scheme has the threat of you being homeless attached to it. That's another aspect to this: collusion doesn't happen in dark smoke-filled rooms anymore. It can be as simple as all "competitors" simply using the same software, which tells them all to do the same thing. Another commenter had it right: this is beyond antitrust or competition law. It's a RICO issue. There's no real structural reason for inflation since the pandemic. The pandemic simply broke the seal on raising prices and now everybody is in on it.

LorenPechtel

And what's really stupid about this is that done openly there probably wouldn't be an issue. Insurance companies can demand providers charge them the lowest rate they charge anyone. Would there have been any issue if Amazon had simply said that to get those features you must match any deals you give anyone else?

refurb

If Amazon punishes sellers for having lower prices elsewhere, isn’t it the sellers choice whether to lower their price on Amazon OR raise their price for other sellers? I didn’t see anything in the article suggesting Amazon ask for the 2nd option, just examples of sellers who did the 2nd one.