In fact, Bezos wanted to name his company “Relentless” instead of “Amazon”.
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Editor’s note: In the blink of an eye, the new century is approaching its twentieth year. In the Internet era, the digital era once gave people hope of economic prosperity, promotion of employment and fairness. But another 10 years have passed, but what has left us is winner-take-all and ethnic tearing. One of the most prominent representatives of this is Amazon. With the advent of another decade, it is clear that Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, has built a somewhat grotesque post-capitalist empire whose size is so large that Standard Oil Company It looks like a small street vendor buying firewood locally. Adam Clark Estes looks back at the rise of this store of things and asks a thought-provoking question: Is it too late to stop Amazon now? Originally published on gizmodo, the title is: Is It Too Late to Stop Amazon?
Post-capitalist Empire
The moment of split brain occurred about a week ago. A video (taken by a camera with a ring watermark from Amazon’s company Ring) shows a video of a man finding a box of snacks on the porch when he sends an Amazon package, and then jumps happily. This video is on fire. But at the moment I did not find happiness in it.
Think about the active part of the video. It was a hungry, dehydrated Amazon employee, or more likely a contractor at Amazon. He was just having fun, but at that moment it turned into a strange viral advertisement. That Amazon-made Ring surveillance camera looks at what the Amazon employee or anyone else nearby is doing, and may share the video with the local police. As everyone knows, in a marketing campaign that could be called a surveillance activity funded by the US state and run by a private company, Amazon and Ring are already using police cooperation to lure potential thieves.
Ten years ago, this situation was very unusual for me. Although the Amazon company was much smaller than it is now, you might think that 2010 is a big explosion for Amazon. Sales increased by 40% year-on-year. The company also launched Amazon Studios. Amazon’s stock price is about to skyrocket. In fact, if you invested in Amazon ten years ago, your total return in December 2019 would be 1232%.
However, in hindsight, these milestones may not be special if you know that Amazon will grow into a company that is far more than a successful company. In the rest of this decade, Amazon has been one by one huge success, one after another major acquisitions, one new record breaking. With the advent of another decade, it is clear that Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, has built a somewhat grotesque post-capitalist empire whose size is so large that Standard Oil Company It looks like a small street vendor buying firewood locally. Amazon not only determines the future of the retail industry in the United States and around the world, its huge cloud computing business can almost ensure that in any day, if you do not pay Bezos’s account, you cannot use the Internet.
What to do when you stare at this dystopian abyss? In this case, maybe it’s time to stop shopping on Amazon. (For our 21st-century tycoon, we have no other means than this old-fashioned boycott.) However, it is not so simple to boycott the empire established by Bezos and never go to this everything store again. . I’m afraid it’s too late to block Amazon now.
The rise of Amazon
Think about your life at the end of the past decade. Think about how you buy things and survive. It’s very likely that when you buy something on Amazon, you have to pay for the goods and wait, and then maybe it’s more convenient to go to the store to buy it yourself. You may not imagine that in the near future, Amazon will install microphones in thousands of homes, or Amazon Prime will become an entry ticket to Whole Foods for cheaper department stores. It’s possible that you don’t worry that Amazon will establish a privatized surveillance country.
But let’s try to look back at history. Back in 2010, things were very different for Amazon customers. At the time, for most people, Amazon was still just an online retailer, and it was not necessarily essential. Amazon Prime is only on the edge. Although this program has been in place since 2005, free two-day delivery offers are still limited to certain items, such as Amazon Prime VideoOther offers are still in their infancy. However, by joining this strange Amazon fan club, becoming a member of Prime Member will definitely feel its avant-garde and unlikely. Contributions ($ 80 in 2010) seemed cheap. Few people will believe that the subscription model will launch Amazon into the sphere of influence in one fell swoop.
Without Prime’s success, it’s hard to imagine Amazon’s dominance today. Judging from its huge scale, Amazon’s market value has grown from about $ 60 billion a decade ago to more than $ 970 billion this year, and during this period, the number of Amazon Prime members has skyrocketed. The service now has more than 100 million users. In the United States, the standard Amazon Prime membership fee is $ 120 per year, which translates to $ 10 per month. For many people, this is a piece of cake. But, as I explained in a desperate article last year, once you pay for Amazon Prime, it will often encourage you to go to Amazon to buy more products. If you really think about it, Amazon Prime is nothing more than a 21st-century Sam membership store (a high-end membership store owned by Wal-Mart). Pay membership dues for some discounts, you know, the next step is to bring home a gallon peanut butter jar because it’s a good deal. This is a successful model. And it’s also supported by gig workers. These people usually don’t get a generous salary, and they don’t get any benefit by packing and shipping your package as fast as possible.
But I think Amazon Prime is more than just a discount club. By becoming a Prime member, customers identify themselves as Amazon enthusiasts, the most loyal customers who like to buy any product the company sells. In recent years, these items have gone beyond books or general merchandise, and include daily necessities, voice-controlled electronics, and home security systems. All these new product categories also provide Amazon with ample opportunity to collect more data about customers. If you are a Prime Member shopping at Whole Foods, have asked Alexa about the weather and used the Ring surveillance camera, Amazon may already know what you ate, when you were sad, and how often you walked naked around the house.
Twenty years ago, few people would take a first look at this online book seller, and no one expected it to take the lead in creating a privatized surveillance country. In particular, few people can predict that by the 2010s, Amazon will not only sell smart speakers that can be used as eavesdropping devices to unsuspecting electronics enthusiasts, but also cooperate with police departments to make it easy for the other party to access the company for sale Private home security camerahead. However, both things are true. Alexa is widely regarded as a serious problem surveillance tool by privacy advocates. Meanwhile, Amazon’s Ring and its neighborhood surveillance app Neighbors have been increasingly criticized for working with 700 U.S. police departments and helping turn Ring users into criminals. These police partners can ask users for home security footage through a dedicated portal, and in return, many of them helped sell more Ring cameras.
Alexa and Ring are terrible at collecting data, and in retrospect it was a bit surprising. But the current impact of data collection for those products is dwarfed by how Amazon’s main businesses (retail and cloud computing) are reshaping the global economy. Once you get out of your personal user experience, you will realize how powerful Amazon will become in the next ten years, and that is a completely frightening feeling.
How to stop Amazon?
It’s no surprise that an online store has become an online shopping mall that knows a lot about what we buy. This data is very useful for helping Amazon’s algorithms suggest what we should buy next. However, according to some, Amazon is abusing access to customer data and is becoming a huge, all-around retail monopolist. The panorama of Amazon’s dominance may even be stronger than that.
Critics say Amazon uses its huge customer database to copy products from popular companies, and then prioritizes Amazon’s own brand products in its search results and its powerful recommendation engine. In other words, although the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has not revealed many details about the full investigation, their antitrust officials have been investigating Amazon’s anticompetitive behavior for months. If the FTC does find that Amazon is disrupting competition, we don’t know what the FTC will do. Earlier this year, the agency fined Facebook a record $ 5 billion for violating consumer privacy. Some prominent politicians, such as Elizabeth Warren, who is expected to run for president, are calling for a split between Amazon and other tech giants, including Facebook, Apple and Google.
But who knows how likely it is to split? After all, Amazon has become one of Washington’s most powerful players in recent years. Since ten years ago, the company’s lobbying spending has grown exponentially, and today it employs more than 100 watermen for its various interests in Washington. (Bezos himself also bought the Washington Post for $ 250 million, but that’s a bit off topic.) Amazon also touched on lucrative government contracts, relying on AWS this year aloneCan earn nearly $ 5 billion in cloud computing contracts. Amazon was definitely right last month when it chose northern Virginia as its second headquarters. That was the place where a lot of government contracts were negotiated.
Even if the government is likely to split Amazon, Bezos may start with the strength and split the company according to his own wishes. Some believe that Bezos could easily spin off the increasingly popular Amazon Web Services (AWS) from the Amazon retail business. AWS ‘business was launched almost 20 years ago, when Amazon realized that the data center infrastructure built for its core retail business could also sell cloud computing services to the outside world, earning extra money. Today, most of Amazon’s profits come from AWS, which has also become the world’s largest cloud computing service provider. This also means that it is now almost impossible to use the Internet without accessing Amazon servers. Therefore, if Bezos turns Amazon and AWS into two separate companies, this will naturally have an impact on regulators-the impact may be enough to calm their concerns about antitrust.
These concerns are destined to evolve. For example, the FTC began investigating anti-competitive behavior in the Amazon market earlier this year, and then earlier this month the investigation has expanded to include AWS. Since the current interpretation of antitrust law depends on whether customers have been harmed by predatory pricing, it is difficult to know exactly what the FTC wants to figure out.
The harm to consumers is difficult to define. Think of Amazon’s growing list of private labels. There are already dozens of products ranging from motor oil to furniture. Third-party sellers complain that Amazon not only monitors trending products by monitoring customer purchase data, but also produces its own versions of popular products and sells under its own brand. This seems to be anti-competitive behavior, but because Amazon is too big and the antitrust law is unclear, so far the company has found a way to deal with allegations of monopoly behavior.
A research firm says Amazon’s share of the e-commerce market is close to 40%. This is already a large scale. Amazon’s public relations team may point out that, according to statistics, Amazon’s share of total US retail sales is much smaller. However, the more disturbing trend is how Amazon has traditionally entered new markets and then dominated in just a few years. Amazon launched AWS in 2006 and by 2018, its market share has dwarfed experienced competitors such as Microsoft and Google. In 2007, Amazon launched the Kindle. By 2018, Amazon has occupied 84% of the e-reader market share and nearly 90% of the e-book market share. In 2009, Amazo