A week or two ago, I discovered that Amazon no longer lets you search product reviews without logging in. On the one hand, these reviews are probably being scraped constantly by web crawlers, driving traffic costs up, and no doubt that may have something to do with the market for fake reviews. But let’s be honest, Amazon is a billion dollar company, and I can’t imaging that is actually hurting them. More likely, they realized that forcing people to log in would allow them to pin product review searches to a particular profile, which can be further sold to advertisers. I just wanted to confirm what an opinion article was saying about a particular book, so if my suspicion is true, that’s kind of disturbing to me because but then it might flag me as being interested in a book I’m not actually interested in, in the same way I sometimes get advertisements for medications to one of my Dad’s medical conditions, simply because I had the audacity to accidentally talk about it near a spying device.
In disgust, I decided to search what I was searching on GoodReads instead. Vote with your dollars, vote with your clicks – same thing, right? But the next day I realized that Amazon owns GoodReads. Great. Nevermind. Fast forward to today, and I was using my browser’s search feature to look for “book” as I was checking a particular scanner on Amazon to see if it was good for scanning books. The browser brought me to the bottom of the page, over a link to “Abe Books”, a site I have used several times for finding specific antique mining catalogs. Wait, what? Amazon owns Abe Books? Apparently they have since 2008. Fuck me, you can’t escape Amazon….
And therein lies the problem: these really large companies typically just buy out their competitors, so they end up pulling money from you anyway. How that gets past regulations, I have no idea, but I’m also not familiar with anti-trust laws. It actually dawned on me that many of these giant corporations are like parasites that survive by infecting other organisms and taking over them. You think you’ve squashed one, but it really just replicated into another host, or series of hosts. In pentesting, on Windows computers and servers, you can often migrate a Meterpreter session into another process, so it’s a similar concept. Facebook – er, Meta -, for example, owns Instagram and a small host of other popular sites, so even though their main product continues to get worse, meaning they really should suffer for making it suck, it has no affect on them, since the company exists beyond Facebook itself. If you have billions of dollars, it doesn’t matter how much you fuck over your clients or users, since you can just buy another successful platform and subsist off of it.
The real problem with modern corporations is that it is so hard to hold them accountable for any of their actions. Sometimes top management does have legal obligations, but whole PR departments exist to smooth-talk their way out of problems, and there is a whole art to being questioned by congress by responding to questions without actually answering them.
To be completely fair, there are a number of businesses that owe their existence to being able to sell on Amazon, so “buying on Amazon” can actually support those companies. My problem with it is that it seems Amazon kind of abuses these sellers and charges a high percentage of sales for the privilege of being searched under the Amazon brand. Moreover, they’ve been accused of stealing designs for their “Amazon Basics” brand, then putting this at the top of search results. But telling businesses they should be thankful to pay a huge chunk to Amazon is like telling slaves they should be thankful just because they have a roof over their head at night. I don’t think anybody would actually choose to sell on Amazon if there were better options, or if they could run a successful store locally.
Every corporation wants to be a monopoly without legally being considered a monopoly. The best way for them to do this, from a societal perspective, is to make the best product or service (although this technically means different things to different people). But the truth is, this is simply no longer necessary, as you can go into debt for 10 plus years, undercut the competition such that they can no longer survive, establish market dominance, then fuck everybody over. This is considered a legitimate business strategy, and that should disturb you. When that’s not your strategy, you can just create an environment that traps users on your platform, such that they have no real option to switch, after which you can easily steal their intellectual property to train your AI or the AIs of your corporate partners, etc. See how this works? There’s a whole host of strategies to drive profits up without actually benefiting consumers, and these strategies have come to absolutely dominate the world we live in.
Mind you, I have no intention of flying the hammer and sickle, because only the truly ignorant do that, but this is not a free market. This is the opposite of a free market. It’s just that the government bureaucrats aren’t necessarily the ones in control this time.
This is just a ‘bitching’ post, I needed to type things out. I don’t have answers, at least not yet. Only, I’m starting to feel stronger and stronger about not supporting these companies. Easier said than done!