So the fine for price fixing is $100M and Amazon is worth $2 trillion so that’s like 20,000x bigger than the fine. I think they will survive this one gang
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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Amazon NUTTED 🤤🤤🤤🤤🤤
I’ve pointed out Valve doing basically the same thing; games can’t be priced lower than Steam on competing game storefronts (not Steam key resellers), or Valve will threaten to delist your game. Which would be essentially kill it. And they obviously do this to protect their chunky store fee.
But personal loyalty goes a long way.
I’m trying to reframe the perspective here, not drag into an argument about Valve. A whole lot of people feel good about finding “deals” on Amazon, about Amazon services that have helped them, and especially about the value and convenience the whole platform provides. It’s easy for Lemmy to hate on Amazon, but for the average person, I think this is a harder sell than most of us realize. They’ll dismiss it as the “market working” or California sensationalism or, more likely, just filter it out as noise in their feed, just like most PC gamers would when they read something bad about Valve.
I boycott pretty much all the big corporations. I can’t really boycott Amazon because I am in a super rural part of the US and run a small business. Like most small businesses I purchase a lot of random doodads and thingamabobbers from china. Amazons monopoly on the US post office and their logistic network that gets bulk goods from china to my house is hard to live without. They fix more than prices, the whole economy is stacked in their favor. They basically won globalism and it was bad for the globe.
Valves scope is much smaller and less destructive. They keep their customers due to loyalty and the investment into a steam library.
Yeah…
That’s how Amazon worked. At first.
Back then, online shopping kind of sucked, and this little book store company made its so streamlined I got invested.
I didn’t invest because I always thought they would get broken up as a monopoly.
But the point is that Valve could easily be Amazon some day. All these little companies taking their first anticompetitive steps could.
Of course everyone loves them when they’re small, and nice, and growing, until they get so big it’s way too late to do anything about it. But many will still feel loyalty, like they do to Amazon today.
Yea it will be interesting to see what happens to valve in the future. Without antitrust laws anything is possible.
There was a time when Amazon was not full of scummy rip-off products, when it was not playing games with prices, when it was not a cloud-computing powerhouse, and you know what happened?
That's right, they crushed their adversaries (retail shopping) and earned billions in profits. They won.
But somehow that's not enough winning, there isn't enough winning until all the value has been vacuumed up from the world.
Bezos explicitly undercut the competition for years to drive all of the competition out of business. Amazon took as much time from 1997-2016 to make as much profit as they did in 2017, which is also (not) coincidentally when they hit peak market saturation and were able to start raising their prices.
So what you're talking about was real, but it wasn't like, "back when Amazon was good", they were just preparing for what they are now. Having a huge monopoly on just about everything has always been their win condition, and they're no where near done winning.
Yeah. It's the same thing Uber did with pushing cab services out of business.
Not only that, but AWS is the real money maker for them. Not that retail and gaming and prime and whatever don't also make boat loads of cash, but it doesn't even graze AWS. The scale of these data centers is unreal and most of the internet runs on AWS.
I'm an industrial electrician with background on what they're ordering and installing in terms of control panels and if you saw the weekly shipments it'd make you sick. And we're only one supplier, they have others.
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