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My son has gotten really good about clearing the snow and ice off the back deck. Alas, he has gotten so good at it, he has it to bare wood. Literally, bare wood. This is not good, because that means the stain / paint came off with the ice. *sigh* I called the painter, to get on his schedule when good weather arrives. He should be able to take care of the deck and the front door, which also needs to be done, altho not because of my son removing ice from it. I would like to be able to say, “of course”, but I’ve seen pictures from Planet Hoth and some people’s doors _do_ ice over. Brrrr.
ETA: I worked on taxes today, since R. had downloaded TurboTax and put some of his own information in. It tentatively ooks like I might have actually correctly calculated estimateds this year. Which would be a freaking miracle if true, unlikely to be repeated.
I’ve been reading a lot of articles about Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to force corporate separation on companies which have a platform where they compete with third parties to sell to customers (Apple, Amazon, etc.). She wants a bright line rule ($25B in annual revenues, I believe) to avoid hitting any “regular” stores. I don’t think this will work, once a judge gets ahold of this idea (I’m ignoring whether or not it is politically feasible to pass a law in anything like this form; certainly, this principle cannot be created out of cases run through the courts using existing law).
Back In the Day, we used to be opposed to vertical integration, and we had a lot of problems with asymmetric information and competing with suppliers. However, over time, antitrust has evolved to focus exclusively on horizontal issues. This happened largely because we could see, over time, the effects of one kind of integration on consumers vs. the other kind. A very large platform such as Amazon’s Marketplace, while run by Amazon, and with Amazon actively expanding its own offerings on what, to the customer, looks like the same platform, where Amazon has access to lots and lots of information that other people don’t presents an interesting hybrid case.
From my perspective as a consumer, the idea of forcing a separation between The Marketplace (the platform that 3rd party sellers can use to market goods) and Amazon’s Own Retail (where Amazon sells its own stuff that it acquires ... wherever) causes my head to explode and makes me want to engage in violence. Usually, this means that I’m having a lot of trouble articulating _why_ this is a terrible idea, all mixed up with fear that no one else will see the problem before it is upon us. Of course, that basically never happens. People generally see stuff in plenty of time. We don’t actually experience unexpected problems as a society. _Someone_ was always out there saying, um, guys. This thing. We should worry about it.
Having reassured myself, I could then proceed to reading comments threads on various sites (WaPo, Ars Technica, The Verge) on this proposal to try to see what other people were thinking. Many people came up with many of the ideas I already had (How Do Aldi’s and TJ’s survive this thing? Did Warren mean to wipe out Costco? Etc.). A lawyer friend pointed out that this is quite a taking by the government, and while I was dismissive of that (hey, taxes are takings. Whatever), she’s right. Pass this law, and anyone harmed by it will wander into court and find a judge to present their case to: what _exactly_ does this law accomplish and is it enough to justify it? Probably the law — if written well, and I have no reason to think it wouldn’t be — would withstand that process (I mean, Connecticut’s eminent domain thing worked, right?), but that does not mean that the people who _passed_ the law would withstand that process, and in fact, there’s some reason to expect that it would acquire a lot of barnacles on the way to passage and more after it hit the court system. Really, no reason to get _too_ agitated about this thing.
Ignoring the massive misunderstanding of Euro antitrust law (why do people think that Euro antitrust law protects competition better? It does not. National law protects certain industries from international competition. Euro level law says they can’t do that, and they are very very slowly churning through that conflict. Given we’ve been dealing with Brexit for a couple of years, there is no certainty how this will turn out. The reason why certain European countries have such vibrant small business sectors and no large businesses to speak of says more about their taxation and regulation structure than anything else, and it’s not anything that anyone who really had to deal with it year in and year out would want) that pervades these discussions, the thing I find _most_ interesting about this “progressive” proposal is the idea that the impact on an abstraction like “competition” is more important than the impact on the consumer.
Many people in the comments threads mention Microsoft. No One in the comments threads mentions how Microsoft leveraged wintel to vapor ware their competition. The rest of the tech community of the 1980s and 1990s and the early aughts fought battles to try to punish Microsoft for their massively anti-consumer, anti-competitive and just flat out (Yes, Stacker) illegal behavior. In the end, they mishandled their transition to the Web so badly (and they did eventually get fined and have to divulge a bunch of information to level the playing field a bit, so they couldn’t keep bricking competing software by changing the OS in subtle ways), that they were outcompeted. Today, Microsoft is mentioned as a perhaps unintentional victim of Warren’s proposal. If they turned out to be a victim, I might view that as an argument in _favor_ of the proposal, purely on the basis of Ancient Animus. It’s not a moral principle. I’m just still mad.
How would Warren’s proposal affect me as a consumer? I mean, let’s say she’s right, and splitting Amazon into two companies, Amazon Marketplace and Amazon the Everything Store (where does AWS go? Does she even _realize_ the existential threat that AWS presents to the web? I mean, that is the substrate that All Runs On. I’d start by wanting to make sure that sucker doesn’t fall apart by accident or El Jefe losing his mind. We are definitely focused on the wrong thing here. Which is fine with me, actually, because I haven’t seen any indication that drawing attention to AWS as the substrate that All Runs On will lead to anything like a good regulatory environment) results in me having shares in both and maybe even being more ludicrously whatever it is I already am. Let’s just start from the premise that me, as a parent of That’s My Baby Over There You Are Sawing In Half!!!! And me as an investor will be basically fine with splitting it in two. What will Walkitout as a Consumer experience?
I hate buying from third party sellers. I mean, I’ll do it, if the ratings are high, the price is reasonable, the need is desperate (Kid Demands Item) and the item is FBA. But if one of those things is not true, I’ll go to eBay, or see if I can talk up a substitute, or whatever. Every time I buy from the Marketplace when the ratings are nonexistent or low, or the price is high, or the item is NOT FBA, by the time it arrives, I have already come to regret the purchase, and the arrival of the product often makes me regret it even more. I wish there was a better way to adjust search settings to only show me shit sold by and shipped by Amazon. Splitting The Marketplace off would just remove all that crap and give me back what I really want.
So, as a consumer, I probably would not be all that sad about splitting Amazon. I have less clarity on my feelings as a consumer about everywhere else, and if you could see my monthly credit card statement (no, I’m not showing it to you) you’d immediately understand why. I shop at Amazon, eat out at various restaurants and bars, and travel. And that is pretty much that (okay, I also pay bills for some extended family when they need help with stuff). I just don’t shop at any other store enough to matter. I’m sympathetic to people who look at the Zon and see The Borg. I buy a ton, and all from one place. If that place harms someone, they are going to be upset, because of the sheer paucity of good alternate choices.
Harrison Bergeron. Harrison Bergeron. Harrison Bergeron. Come on, I know you people. The ones who hate the Zon tend to love Kurt Vonnegut. I don’t. I loathe that story. I don’t much care for that author. But seriously. How is this not relevant?
Fine.
Let’s pretend that Warren gets her rule, in this form, it survives court challenges, the Zon must make the choice and the Zon does one of two things having exhausted all alternative remedies (this will never come to pass, and it’ll be obvious in a paragraph why, but play along). The Zon can spin off The Marketplace to comply with the law. Or The Zon can shut the Marketplace down, say thanks for playing, and go back to being The Everything Store (with its AWS substrate intact and unregulated. Because it is invisible to regulators).
El Jefe has a lot on his plate. He shut down Zshops when he had a lot on his plate in the past. Given the choice between spinning off The Marketplace, and experience the blowback of what would happen when it was run separate from The Everything Store, and just shutting it down as More Trouble Than It Is Worth, I harbor a real suspicion he would attempt to sell it, and then shut it down, unless he had a set of protégés running around just dying to run the thing who had super awesome good ideas about how to make it work as a standalone entity. Which is unlikely, because here’s the deal. Everyone at Zshops before, and everyone at The Marketplace now is there, putting up with fiendish and escalating requirements by Amazon, and the everpresent risk that Amazon will copy and annihilate their most successful products for one and only one reason: all those shoppers shopping at The Everything Store who might deign to buy their shit, if Amazon isn’t currently able to supply that shit at the lowest price. Remember when Amazon Affiliates were found to establish nexus and Amazon shut them down? Remember that blowback? That was a tiny preview of what Warren is teeing up to start. (Yes, I know that eventually Amazon was everywhere and implements sales tax collection everywhere. If you can figure out how that is relevant, I am interested.)
If The Marketplace doesn’t get The Everything Store’s eyeballs, it is just another flea market like eBay. Where I don’t shop anymore, except when the ratings on what I want to buy at the third party sellers on the Zon are too low.
Warren is going to wind up pissing off _exactly_ the group of people she is trying to help. Just wait. It will be epic.
ETA:
Also, I _still_ don’t see how this helps with competition. I mean, Apple’s App Store and the Zon’s Marketplace have been amazing incubators of entrepreneurial energy. People’s frustrated by zoning impulses to open a shop and sell the things they love — or arbitrage cheap shit on closeout sale in one location to a different place where someone desperately wants one of those cheap things — are satisfied by the Marketplace in a way I had never even imagined possible. The App Store has allowed individual developers to strike out on their own in a way that We Always Wanted (thank you, ACA, for making sure this didn’t result in us dying unnecessarily when we undertook those risks to pursue our dreams). Standalone bazaars did not accomplish this. Successful big operators willing to let us shelter in their awnings and corners of their big tents made it happen.
ETA: I worked on taxes today, since R. had downloaded TurboTax and put some of his own information in. It tentatively ooks like I might have actually correctly calculated estimateds this year. Which would be a freaking miracle if true, unlikely to be repeated.
I’ve been reading a lot of articles about Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to force corporate separation on companies which have a platform where they compete with third parties to sell to customers (Apple, Amazon, etc.). She wants a bright line rule ($25B in annual revenues, I believe) to avoid hitting any “regular” stores. I don’t think this will work, once a judge gets ahold of this idea (I’m ignoring whether or not it is politically feasible to pass a law in anything like this form; certainly, this principle cannot be created out of cases run through the courts using existing law).
Back In the Day, we used to be opposed to vertical integration, and we had a lot of problems with asymmetric information and competing with suppliers. However, over time, antitrust has evolved to focus exclusively on horizontal issues. This happened largely because we could see, over time, the effects of one kind of integration on consumers vs. the other kind. A very large platform such as Amazon’s Marketplace, while run by Amazon, and with Amazon actively expanding its own offerings on what, to the customer, looks like the same platform, where Amazon has access to lots and lots of information that other people don’t presents an interesting hybrid case.
From my perspective as a consumer, the idea of forcing a separation between The Marketplace (the platform that 3rd party sellers can use to market goods) and Amazon’s Own Retail (where Amazon sells its own stuff that it acquires ... wherever) causes my head to explode and makes me want to engage in violence. Usually, this means that I’m having a lot of trouble articulating _why_ this is a terrible idea, all mixed up with fear that no one else will see the problem before it is upon us. Of course, that basically never happens. People generally see stuff in plenty of time. We don’t actually experience unexpected problems as a society. _Someone_ was always out there saying, um, guys. This thing. We should worry about it.
Having reassured myself, I could then proceed to reading comments threads on various sites (WaPo, Ars Technica, The Verge) on this proposal to try to see what other people were thinking. Many people came up with many of the ideas I already had (How Do Aldi’s and TJ’s survive this thing? Did Warren mean to wipe out Costco? Etc.). A lawyer friend pointed out that this is quite a taking by the government, and while I was dismissive of that (hey, taxes are takings. Whatever), she’s right. Pass this law, and anyone harmed by it will wander into court and find a judge to present their case to: what _exactly_ does this law accomplish and is it enough to justify it? Probably the law — if written well, and I have no reason to think it wouldn’t be — would withstand that process (I mean, Connecticut’s eminent domain thing worked, right?), but that does not mean that the people who _passed_ the law would withstand that process, and in fact, there’s some reason to expect that it would acquire a lot of barnacles on the way to passage and more after it hit the court system. Really, no reason to get _too_ agitated about this thing.
Ignoring the massive misunderstanding of Euro antitrust law (why do people think that Euro antitrust law protects competition better? It does not. National law protects certain industries from international competition. Euro level law says they can’t do that, and they are very very slowly churning through that conflict. Given we’ve been dealing with Brexit for a couple of years, there is no certainty how this will turn out. The reason why certain European countries have such vibrant small business sectors and no large businesses to speak of says more about their taxation and regulation structure than anything else, and it’s not anything that anyone who really had to deal with it year in and year out would want) that pervades these discussions, the thing I find _most_ interesting about this “progressive” proposal is the idea that the impact on an abstraction like “competition” is more important than the impact on the consumer.
Many people in the comments threads mention Microsoft. No One in the comments threads mentions how Microsoft leveraged wintel to vapor ware their competition. The rest of the tech community of the 1980s and 1990s and the early aughts fought battles to try to punish Microsoft for their massively anti-consumer, anti-competitive and just flat out (Yes, Stacker) illegal behavior. In the end, they mishandled their transition to the Web so badly (and they did eventually get fined and have to divulge a bunch of information to level the playing field a bit, so they couldn’t keep bricking competing software by changing the OS in subtle ways), that they were outcompeted. Today, Microsoft is mentioned as a perhaps unintentional victim of Warren’s proposal. If they turned out to be a victim, I might view that as an argument in _favor_ of the proposal, purely on the basis of Ancient Animus. It’s not a moral principle. I’m just still mad.
How would Warren’s proposal affect me as a consumer? I mean, let’s say she’s right, and splitting Amazon into two companies, Amazon Marketplace and Amazon the Everything Store (where does AWS go? Does she even _realize_ the existential threat that AWS presents to the web? I mean, that is the substrate that All Runs On. I’d start by wanting to make sure that sucker doesn’t fall apart by accident or El Jefe losing his mind. We are definitely focused on the wrong thing here. Which is fine with me, actually, because I haven’t seen any indication that drawing attention to AWS as the substrate that All Runs On will lead to anything like a good regulatory environment) results in me having shares in both and maybe even being more ludicrously whatever it is I already am. Let’s just start from the premise that me, as a parent of That’s My Baby Over There You Are Sawing In Half!!!! And me as an investor will be basically fine with splitting it in two. What will Walkitout as a Consumer experience?
I hate buying from third party sellers. I mean, I’ll do it, if the ratings are high, the price is reasonable, the need is desperate (Kid Demands Item) and the item is FBA. But if one of those things is not true, I’ll go to eBay, or see if I can talk up a substitute, or whatever. Every time I buy from the Marketplace when the ratings are nonexistent or low, or the price is high, or the item is NOT FBA, by the time it arrives, I have already come to regret the purchase, and the arrival of the product often makes me regret it even more. I wish there was a better way to adjust search settings to only show me shit sold by and shipped by Amazon. Splitting The Marketplace off would just remove all that crap and give me back what I really want.
So, as a consumer, I probably would not be all that sad about splitting Amazon. I have less clarity on my feelings as a consumer about everywhere else, and if you could see my monthly credit card statement (no, I’m not showing it to you) you’d immediately understand why. I shop at Amazon, eat out at various restaurants and bars, and travel. And that is pretty much that (okay, I also pay bills for some extended family when they need help with stuff). I just don’t shop at any other store enough to matter. I’m sympathetic to people who look at the Zon and see The Borg. I buy a ton, and all from one place. If that place harms someone, they are going to be upset, because of the sheer paucity of good alternate choices.
Harrison Bergeron. Harrison Bergeron. Harrison Bergeron. Come on, I know you people. The ones who hate the Zon tend to love Kurt Vonnegut. I don’t. I loathe that story. I don’t much care for that author. But seriously. How is this not relevant?
Fine.
Let’s pretend that Warren gets her rule, in this form, it survives court challenges, the Zon must make the choice and the Zon does one of two things having exhausted all alternative remedies (this will never come to pass, and it’ll be obvious in a paragraph why, but play along). The Zon can spin off The Marketplace to comply with the law. Or The Zon can shut the Marketplace down, say thanks for playing, and go back to being The Everything Store (with its AWS substrate intact and unregulated. Because it is invisible to regulators).
El Jefe has a lot on his plate. He shut down Zshops when he had a lot on his plate in the past. Given the choice between spinning off The Marketplace, and experience the blowback of what would happen when it was run separate from The Everything Store, and just shutting it down as More Trouble Than It Is Worth, I harbor a real suspicion he would attempt to sell it, and then shut it down, unless he had a set of protégés running around just dying to run the thing who had super awesome good ideas about how to make it work as a standalone entity. Which is unlikely, because here’s the deal. Everyone at Zshops before, and everyone at The Marketplace now is there, putting up with fiendish and escalating requirements by Amazon, and the everpresent risk that Amazon will copy and annihilate their most successful products for one and only one reason: all those shoppers shopping at The Everything Store who might deign to buy their shit, if Amazon isn’t currently able to supply that shit at the lowest price. Remember when Amazon Affiliates were found to establish nexus and Amazon shut them down? Remember that blowback? That was a tiny preview of what Warren is teeing up to start. (Yes, I know that eventually Amazon was everywhere and implements sales tax collection everywhere. If you can figure out how that is relevant, I am interested.)
If The Marketplace doesn’t get The Everything Store’s eyeballs, it is just another flea market like eBay. Where I don’t shop anymore, except when the ratings on what I want to buy at the third party sellers on the Zon are too low.
Warren is going to wind up pissing off _exactly_ the group of people she is trying to help. Just wait. It will be epic.
ETA:
Also, I _still_ don’t see how this helps with competition. I mean, Apple’s App Store and the Zon’s Marketplace have been amazing incubators of entrepreneurial energy. People’s frustrated by zoning impulses to open a shop and sell the things they love — or arbitrage cheap shit on closeout sale in one location to a different place where someone desperately wants one of those cheap things — are satisfied by the Marketplace in a way I had never even imagined possible. The App Store has allowed individual developers to strike out on their own in a way that We Always Wanted (thank you, ACA, for making sure this didn’t result in us dying unnecessarily when we undertook those risks to pursue our dreams). Standalone bazaars did not accomplish this. Successful big operators willing to let us shelter in their awnings and corners of their big tents made it happen.