Today, the German Federal Court of Justice deliberated on tougher competition control measures for Amazon. The outcome could have significant implications for the Tech giant's market power.

In a first assessment, the court found the law to be constitutional. An important signal in breaking up big tech's #monopolypower. However, the final decision is still pending. #breakupbigtech

https://www.zeit.de/news/2023-06/27/bgh-verhandelt-ueber-haertere-wettbewerbskontrolle-von-amazon?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

When you are reminded that capitalism stops not starts technological development

#plannedobsolescence
#monopolypower
#nofacebook

Today, @somo published a report on Amazon's European marketplaces which shows how Amazon’s market power has grown during the last 20 years and how this impacts independent online sellers and the wider economy.

Independent online sellers are locked in by Amazons #monopolypower which enables the Tech-Giant to extract higher fees from them:
https://www.somo.nl/amazons-chokehold-over-online-shopping-in-the-eu-and-uk/

This states clearly that the #EU needs to take more structural solutions and sharpen its antitrust tools to takle #monopolypower.

NEW REPORT🚨 We looked into @amazon’s European marketplaces & found that:

📦Amazon holds European independent online sellers in a chokehold;

📦Because of its #monopolypower, Amazon gets away with extracting ever higher fees from sellers


Read more👉https://www.somo.nl/amazons-european-chokehold/

Competition is bad for profits, so working toward #monopolypower is standard business practice.

@smeg

Bad for business means disrupting the predetermined winners. Customers are confused means customers aren't buying the predetermined preferred products as winners in the contrived fiction capitalists call the Free Market.

Even their occasional loud whining about the horrors of socialism and the catastrophe that "picking winners and losers" would be is just smokescreen to cover the ugly fact that they are reliant on both already.

They do so hate market competition and seem to use monopoly power and regulatory capture in a relaxed and open way that wants you to believe this is part of what healthy markets intend.

I agree with you, though. No one is confused by the milk labeling. The powerful just hate the idea of competing. Markets are ways to distract and wear down or entertain the weak so they won't have time or energy or interest left to question those who, to quote Tytler in a way that fulfills his famous prediction in a way I doubt he envisioned, have learned they can "vote themselves largesse from the public treasury".

This rot is, as Tytler predicted, putting Democracy at risk. And loss of Democracy extinguishes any hope of us having a say in our collective future or the health of the planet. Because the capitalists clearly don't care.

#milk #food #sustainability #markets #Monopoly #MonopolyPower #MarketCompetition #FreeMarkets #RegulatoryCapture #Tytler #Antitrust #Democracy

#BigTech #MonopolyPower #IntellectualMonopolies #Capitalism: "Despite the knocks to their shares in late 2022 with the end of quantitative easing, the tech giants remain a dominant feature of the 21st-century scene. Indeed, it is striking that all the firms that did well in 2022—Big Oil and Big Pharma, as well as Big Tech—have one thing in common: they all exercise monopoly power over other firms. Where they differ is in what they control—what they deprive others of—which has important implications: those that systematically monopolize knowledge and data exert a global exclusion which makes them more resilient. What follows will examine the novel nature of Big Tech’s monopoly power, the factors that have given rise to it and the mechanisms used to enforce its hold over other firms. I will look in particular at the case of Microsoft, which jostles with Apple and Aramco in the top three corporations by market value. But first, some more general considerations about monopoly power may be in order."

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii139/articles/capitalism-as-usual