Google is now a $2Tn company, or roughly worth 10% of US GDP

It's wrong to say that Amazon has an advertising business, it has an online retail business and it charges fees for getting your goods in front of customers. Those are slotting fees, not ads. wsj.com/articles/amazo…

3. Read more in our Amazon’s Toll Road report: ilsr.org/amazons-toll-r… (And, btw, our projections made last fall for Amazon’s full 2021 results were spot-on.)

1. Altogether, in 2021, Amazon took in $120 billion in revenue from the fees it imposes on third-party sellers. That’s massive. For every $100 in sales a seller made in 2021, Amazon pocketed $34. That’s up from $19 in 2014.

3. Much of this growth in fees has been from “advertising.” Sellers used to rely on good ratings to land their products on the first page. Now they have to buy ads. In 2021, on top of $46 billion in referral fees, Amazon levied $17 billion in ad fees on sellers.

Amazon’s ‘ads’ business is just forcing sellers to pay for digital shelf space. It’s not advertising it’s an abuse of market power.

Our entire special issue on how outsourcing, monopolization, deregulation, financialization, and just-in-time logistics broke our supply chains is available at prospect.org/supplychain.

The reason ends in -opoly

The Heritage Foundation's report on big tech is quite something. There is a lot here, and I'm still going through it, but it's astonishing how quickly conservatives are changing their minds on questions of market power.

This chart from today’s Financial Times on the growth in pre-tax #earnings illustrates the massive increase in income inequality in the US since 1976. This is part of the notable worsening in the #inequality trifecta — of income, wealth and inequality. #economy

Fantastic video on Amazon Prime by Matt Stoller youtube.com/watch?v=O8Jk7z…

It’s about time. Massive industry governed by laws and cronyism constructed in the early 1900’s protected by massive lobbying efforts. Will be fun to watch this play out…

When do governments of the world start looking at antitrust for TSMC? Someone with >50% share, higher in many technologies, forcing customers to sign long term deals with prepayments. Sure sounds like something antitrust could step in for... Someone else posed that Q to me $TSM

The Google monopoly 'rife with conflicts of interest': Publishers file European antitrust complaint against tech giant over its stranglehold on advertising and 'unlawful tactics' that threaten the future of media dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…

1. Great news: The FTC may do a study on PBMs, the powerful corps that 1) control reimbursement rates for indie pharmacies and 2) run their own competing pharmacies. Three PBMs dominate. The largest is CVS. ILSR has pushed this issue for a decade. Some background...

Why would anyone think market power and inflation are related? That’s crazy talk.

Still amazes me that we would never have allowed the Soviet Union to own CBS/NBC/ABC during the Cold War but we let the Chinese Communist Party control the black box algorithm for the most popular social media app in our country

I'm for banning TikTok in the United States because it's exceptionally dangerous to have the Chinese government controlling a major domestic media platform. It's also interesting that the firm screws its creators. youtube.com/watch?v=jAZapF…

Who is really trying to defund the police? Big tech. mattstoller.substack.com/p/big-tech-tri…

Charlie Munger doesn’t like the passive ETF/ index duopoly that put Larry Fink in charge of the world.