Take a look at Lord Lucas in Britain’s parliament, talking very frankly about Amazon. This is scary stuff. Some excerpts:
Amazon is an amoral monopsony in its growth phase. It is using extremely low margins to drive market share. It is using aggressive tax avoidance to afford those low margins. It is not just us that it does not pay tax to; it does not pay tax to anybody.We now have nowhere to shop on a large scale. The internet retailers have control and the internet retailer that will have control above all is Amazon.
Suppliers will then become dependent on the one retailer. It is clear where Amazon intends to go after that: it intends to take out the publishers.
It is already doing that in the States, forming its own relationships with authors and publishing its own exclusive-to-Amazon books.
At the end of the day, what need has a company with three-quarters of the book trade of independent publishers? It can do everything itself.
It will continue to use a wide range of predatory tactics to do that.
Amazon trawls the web to make sure that it always offers the lowest price on anything. It compels suppliers to charge it less than they do anybody else, on pain of being dropped-either individual projects or entirely.
It runs this thing called Amazon Marketplace, where little traders can go, but it knows everything that happens in that marketplace: all communications between a business and its customers, what is being sold and at what price.
When it sees a good opportunity, it goes to the supplier and undercuts the trader.
No comments:
Post a Comment