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Better give them a 10 million dollar fine to teach them a lesson!
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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Technology
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10 million dollars is to $1B as a paperclip is to my entire net worth (admittedly not much)
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This has been widely known for at least a decade. I worked for an Amazon competitor back in 2013, and industry wide algorithmic price fuckery, including trying to figure out if your rivals were scraping you and poisoning their data, was common and openly discussed as a normal part of business operations.
The explicit directive of our economic system is to make as much money as possible in competition with everyone else. Or course companies are going to pour resources into using any and all technological fuckery to do that.
This is why Amazon tried to sue “isthereanydeal” for tracking previous prices
It was pretty frustrating to see Amazon not listed there and not understanding why. And all they could say was "Amazon won't let us".
But how does camelcamelcamel get away with it?
I don't know enough about isthereanydeal, but camelcamelcamel uses Amazon API, so the extent of their fuckery is likely concealed.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Last week, the Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon, alleging that the online retailer was illegally maintaining a monopoly.
People familiar with the FTC's allegations in the complaint told the Journal that it all started when Amazon developed an algorithm code-named "Project Nessie."
The controversial algorithm was allegedly used for years and helped Amazon to "improve its profits on items across shopping categories" and "led competitors to raise their prices and charge customers more," the WSJ reported.
FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar told the WSJ that the agency wants more public access to redacted information in the complaint and continues to "call on Amazon to move swiftly to remove the redactions and allow the American public to see the full scope of what we allege are their illegal monopolistic practices.”
In a press release, the FTC confirmed that it intends to prove that Amazon is "stifling competition on price," among other alleged consumer harms.
"Seldom in the history of US antitrust law has one case had the potential to do so much good for so many people," John Newman, the deputy director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, said.
The original article contains 627 words, the summary contains 187 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Good bot
Oh, spicy arguments. "Algorithms are evil" versus "we were just price matching."