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1. Embed this notice
   Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:43:20 JST Cory Doctorow

   Turns out Donald Trump isn't the only world leader with a tech billionaire "first buddy" who gets to serve as an unaccountable, self-interested de facto business regulator. UK PM Kier Starmer has just handed the keys to the British economy over to Jeff Bezos.

   --

   If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

   https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

   1/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:44:01 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Oh, not literally. But here's what's happened: the UK's Competitions and Markets Authority, an organisation charged with investigating and punishing tech monopolists (like Amazon) has just been turned over to Doug Gurr, the guy who used to run Amazon UK.

     2/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:45:06 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     This is - incredibly - even worse than it sounds. Marcus Bokkerink, outgoing head of the CMA, is *amazing*, and had charge over the CMA's Digital Markets Unit, the largest, best-staffed technical body of any competition regulator in the world. The DMU uses its investigatory powers to dig into complex monopolistic businesses like Amazon. Last year, the DMU got new enforcement powers that would let it custom-craft regulations to address tech monopolization (again, like Amazon's).

     3/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:45:16 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     But it's even *worse*. The CMA and DMU are the headwaters of a global system of super-effective Big Tech regulation. The CMA's deeply investigated reports on tech monopolists are used as the basis for EU regulations and enforcement actions, and these actions are then re-run by other world governments, like South Korea and Japan:

     https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

     4/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:45:32 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The CMA is the global convener and ringleader in tech antitrust, in other words. Smaller and/or poorer countries that lack the resources to investigate and build a case against US Big Tech companies have been able to copy-paste the work of the CMA and hold these companies to account. The CMA invites (or used to invite) all of these competition regulators to its HQ in Canary Wharf for conferences where they plan global strategy against these monopolists:

     https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cma-data-technology-and-analytics-conference-2022-registration-308678625077

     5/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:45:47 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Firing the guy who is making all this happening and replacing him with Amazon's UK boss is a breathtaking display of regulatory capture by Starmer, his business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, and his exchequer, Rachel Reeves.

     But it gets even *worse*, because Amazon isn't just any tech monopolist. Amazon is a many-tentacled kraken built around an e-commerce empire.

     6/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:46:37 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Antitrust regulators elsewhere have laid bare how Amazon uses its retail monopoly to control whole economies, raising prices and crushing small businesses.

     To understand Amazon's market power, first you have to understand "monopsonies" - markets dominated by *buyers* (monopolies are dominated by *sellers* - Amazon is a monopolist and a monopsonist). Monopsonies are far more dangerous than monopolies, because they are easier to establish and easier to defend against competitors.

     7/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:46:51 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Say a single retailer accounts for 30% of your sales: there isn't a business in the world that can survive an overnight 30% drop in sales, so that 30% market share might as well be 100%. Once your order is big enough that canceling it would bankrupt your supplier, you have near-total control over that supplier.

     Amazon boasts about this. They call it "the flywheel": Amazon locks in shoppers (by getting them to prepay for a year's worth of shipping in advance, via Prime).

     8/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:47:01 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The fact that a business can't sell to a large proportion of households if it's not on Amazon gives Amazon near-total power over that business. Amazon uses that power to demand discounts and charge junk fees to the businesses that rely on it. This allows it to lower prices, which brings in more customers, which means that even more businesses have to do business with Amazon to stay afloat:

     https://vimeo.com/739486256/00a0a7379a

     9/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:47:14 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     That's Amazon's version, anyway. In reality, it's a lot scuzzier. Amazon doesn't just demand deep discounts from its suppliers - it demand *unsustainable* discounts from them. For example, Amazon targeted small publishers with a program called the "Gazelle Project." Jeff Bezos told his negotiators to bring down these publishers "the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle":

     https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/a-new-book-portrays-amazon-as-bully/

     10/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:47:24 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The idea was to get a bunch of cheap books for the Kindle to help it achieve critical mass, at the expense of driving these publishers out of business. They were a kind of disposable rocket stage for Amazon.

     Deep discounts aren't the only way that Amazon feeds off its suppliers: it also lards junk-fee atop junk-fee. For every pound Amazon makes from its customers, it rakes in 45-51p in fees:

     https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute

     11/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:47:47 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Now, just like there's no business that can survive losing 30% of its sales overnight, there's also no business that can afford to hand 45-51% of its gross margin to a retailer. For businesses to survive at all on Amazon, they have to jack their prices up - *way* up. However, Amazon has an anticompetitive deal called "most favoured nation status" that forces suppliers to sell their goods on Amazon at the same price as they sell them elsewhere (even from their own stores).

     12/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:48:03 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     So when companies raise their prices in order to pay ransom to Amazon, they have to raise their prices everywhere. Far from being a force for low prices, Amazon makes prices go up *everywhere*, from the big Tesco's to the corner shop:

     https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

     13/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:48:16 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Amazon makes so much money off of this scam that it doesn't have to pay *anything* to ship its own goods - the profits from overcharging merchants for "fulfillment by Amazon" pay for *all* the shipping, on *everything* Amazon sells:

     https://cdn.ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/AmazonMonopolyTollbooth-2023.pdf

     Amazon competes with its own sellers, but unlike those sellers, it doesn't have to pay a 45-51% rake - and it can make its competitor-customers cover the full cost of its own shipping!

     14/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:48:39 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     On top of that, Amazon maintains the pretense that its headquarters are in Luxembourg, a tax- and crime-haven, and pays a fraction of the taxes that British businesses pay to HMRC (and that's not counting the 45-51% tax they pay to Jeff Bezos's monoposony).

     That's not the only way that Amazon unfairly competes with British businesses, though: Amazon uses its position as a middleman between buyers and sellers to identify the most successful products sold by its own customers.

     15/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:48:49 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Then it copies those products and sells them below the original inventor's costs (because it gets free shipping, pays no tax, and doesn't have to pay its own junk fees), and drives those businesses into the ground. Even Jeff "Project Gazelle" Bezos seems to understand that this is a bad look, which is why he perjured himself to the American Congress when he was questioned under oath about it:

     https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58961836

     16/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:49:08 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Amazon then places its knockoff products above the original goods on its search results page. Amazon makes $38b selling off placement on these search pages, and the top results for an Amazon search aren't the best matches for your query - they're the ones that pay the most. On average, Amazon's top result for a search is 29% more expensive than the best match on the site. On average, the top row of results is 25% more expensive than the best match on the site.

     17/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:49:20 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     On average, Amazon buries the best result for your search 17 places down the results page:

     https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

     Amazon, in other words, acts like the business regulator for the economies it dominates. It decides what can be sold, and at what prices. It decides whose products come up when you search, and thus which businesses deserve to live and which ones deserve to die.

     18/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:49:59 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     An economy dominated by Amazon isn't a market economy - it's a planned economy, run by Party Secretary Bezos to benefit Amazon's shareholders.

     Now, there *is* a role for a business regulator, because some businesses really *don't* deserve to live (they sell harmful products, engage in deceptive practices, etc). The UK has a regulator that's in charge of this stuff: the Competition and Markets Authority, which is now going to be run by Jeff Bezos's hand-picked UK Amazon boss.

     19/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:50:10 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     That means that Amazon is now both the official and the unofficial central planner of the UK economy, with a free hand to raise prices, lower quality, and destroy British businesses, while hiding its profits in Luxemourg and starving the exchequer of taxes.

     The "first buddy" role that Kier Starmer just handed over to Jeff Bezos is, in every way, more generous than the first buddy deal Trump gave Elon Musk.

     20/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:50:23 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Starmer's government claims they're doing this for "growth" but Amazon isn't a force for growth, it's force for extraction. It is a notorious underpayer of its labour force, a notorious tax-cheat, and a world-beating destroyer of local economies, local jobs, and local tax bases. Contrary to Amazon's own self-mythologizing, it doesn't deliver lower prices - it raises prices throughout the economy.

     21/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:50:38 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     It doesn't improve quality - this is a company whose algorithmic recommendation system failed to recognize that an "energy drink" was actually its own drivers' bottled piss, which it then promoted until it was the best-selling energy drink on the platform:

     https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

     22/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:50:50 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     There's a reason that the UK, the EU, Japan and South Korea found it so easy to collaborate on antitrust cases against American companies: these are all countries whose competition law was rewritten by American technocrats during the Marshall Plan, modeled on the US's own laws.

     23/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:51:05 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The bedrock of US competition law is 1890's Sherman Act, whose author, Senator John Sherman, declared that:

     > If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.

     https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

     24/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:51:16 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Jeff Bezos is the autocrat of trade that John Sherman warned us about, 135 years ago. And Kier Starmer just abdicated in his favour.

     25/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:51:28 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     *Picks and Shovels* is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You have one more week pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:

     http://martinhench.com

     26/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 03:51:36 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Image:
     UK Parliament/Maria Unger (modified)
     https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Keir_Starmer_2024.jpg

     CC BY 3.0
     https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

     --

     Steve Jurvetson (modified)
     https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeff_Bezos%27_iconic_laugh.jpg

     CC BY 2.0
     https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

     eof/

   • Embed this notice
     Flic (flisty@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 04:55:31 JST Flic

     in reply to

     @pluralistic good grief. What the hell are they doing

     Cory Doctorow repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Urzl (gooba42@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 05:03:56 JST Urzl

     in reply to

     • Flic

     @Flisty @pluralistic Divvying up the spoils of the oligarchs' successfully waged class war.

   • Embed this notice
     Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈 (lazarou@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 05:03:56 JST Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈

     in reply to

     @pluralistic Never voted for the guy, felt he would sell us out to America without even a vote and oh look, he has....

     #Starmer #UKPOL #UKpolitics

     Cory Doctorow repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     SaftyKuma (saftykuma@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 05:39:34 JST SaftyKuma

     in reply to

     • Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈

     @Lazarou @pluralistic

     Really awesome that Tony Blair turned Labour into Tory-light, isn't it? 😢

     Cory Doctorow repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmit (genxotaku1971@urusai.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 06:25:56 JST John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmit

     in reply to

     • Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈
     • SaftyKuma

     @SaftyKuma @Lazarou @pluralistic and now Starmer is British Joe Biden.

   • Embed this notice
     Difficile (difficile@fops.cloud)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 06:26:17 JST Difficile

     in reply to
     @pluralistic please, you can hide the other parts of your thread and not spam the whole thread in the timeline. Or ask your admin to bump up the character limit of the instance.
   • Embed this notice
     Chris Wood (chriswood@mastodon.design)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 06:35:10 JST Chris Wood

     in reply to

     @pluralistic I’ll be writing to my MP about this. Here’s how to do it if anyone else also feels inspired to:
     https://www.writetothem.com

   • Embed this notice
     Nicole Parsons (npars01@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 10:13:09 JST Nicole Parsons

     in reply to

     @pluralistic

     Monopsonies also suppress wages across entire industries
     https://www.epi.org/unequalpower/publications/pervasive-monopsony-power-and-freedom-in-the-labor-market/

     https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/4/6/17204808/wages-employers-workers-monopsony-growth-stagnation-inequality

     https://samhillman.substack.com/p/wage-determination-and-labour-market?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

     AI algorithms are already being used like Harlan Crow's RealPage -- to manipulate the market in favor of monopolies

     https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2021/06/18/artificial-intelligence-has-caused--50-to-70-decrease-in-wages-creating-income-inequality-and-threatening-millions-of-jobs/

     https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230718-ai-artificial-intelligence-worker-wages-salaries

     https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-uber-driver-pay-algorithm-ontario/

     Amazon sets wages in stone for warehouses, IT, & distribution systems in several countries.

   • Embed this notice
     Daniel Blake (daniel_blake@mastodon.top)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 10:23:07 JST Daniel Blake

     in reply to

     • LisPi

     @pluralistic @lispi314 Point of order m’lud: I don’t think Tesco sell via Amazon.

   • Embed this notice
     Sy Taffel (sy@mastodon.nz)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 10:23:21 JST Sy Taffel

     in reply to

     'The "first buddy" role that Keir Starmer just handed over to Jeff Bezos is, in every way, more generous than the first buddy deal Trump gave Elon Musk.

     Starmer's government claims they're doing this for "growth" but #Amazon isn't a force for #growth it's force for extraction. It is a notorious underpayer of its labour force, a notorious tax-cheat, and a world-beating destroyer of local economies, local jobs, and local tax bases.'

     https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

     @pluralistic is spot on here

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 10:25:50 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     • Daniel Blake
     • LisPi

     @Daniel_Blake @lispi314 You've misunderstood. If a supplier raises their price at Amazon they have to raise their price to match it at Tesco or Amazon will refuse to carry it

   • Embed this notice
     La lutte continue... (linuxgnome@todon.eu)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 22:54:07 JST La lutte continue...

     in reply to

     @pluralistic

     We recognize what Bezos does, too. If a distribution centre looks like it will unionize, he shuts it down.