Today, NetChoice released “A Prime Target—The Attack on Amazon in an Age of Weaponized Antitrust”, a paper that focuses on how Amazon is neither guilty of monopolization nor anticompetitive practices. Our research discusses how Amazon’s practices are tried-and-true retail practices that benefit customers.
“Amazon was a small business that consistently innovated until its prices were extra affordable and its customer satisfaction was virtually unmatched,” said Carl Szabo, Vice President and General Counsel at NetChoice. “Politicizing antitrust to break up such an innovator in is likely to ruin the growing digital marketplace we’ve all relied on during COVID-19.”
“Today’s antitrust attacks on Amazon and America’s tech businesses is political theatre whose finale is the decimation of consumer convenience online— leaving Americans with inferior products, higher prices, and less cutting-edge tech long-term,” continued Szabo.
In this report, we detail:
- The “big is bad” approach against Amazon will raise prices, lower the quality of goods and services, and stifle innovation overall.
- Politicizing antitrust enforcement can easily be abused by large corporations to harm their competitors.
- Because buyers can shop at physical retail stores and websites while sellers can sell at physical retail stores as well as on other websites, Amazon’s relevant market is retail where its market share in 2019 was 6%. Even under a narrower market definition of e-commerce, Amazon has only a 24% market share.
- Amazon’s acquisitions and mergers of Zappos, Ring, PillPack, and Whole Foods are about far more than just acquiring another business, rather they are about improving infrastructure, talent, intellectual property, and more choices for consumers.