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« Some good news | Main | On this Valentine's Day, please respect this » Make Amazon a public utilityI haven't fully read this paper by Lina Khan yet, let alone fully digested it. But there's something in there that i think i'm going to like, so i'm blogging it here so i don't forget about it (and to share, ofc). Whenever i read people worrying about Amazon becoming a monopoly. Because, i looooove Amazon. I can't conceive of a more simple way to buy... everything, and i'd really hate it if Amazon were broken up and i had to go to multiple websites to shop. But of course i also recognize that concentrated power is bad in general. For Amazon, that means that once it's driven all of its competitors out of business it might finally raise prices (to the point where it might actually become profitable). My solution to this has always been to simply nationalize it, but of course i am a socialist loon. So it's nice to see a Yale academic, among other points, making a similar, but less extreme argument (as one of two possible solutions, the other being anti-trust action). The idea is to regulate Amazon as a public utility: Although largely out of fashion today, public utility regulations were widely adopted in the early 1900s, as a way of regulating the technologies of the industrial age... Matt Stoller has a tl;dr tweetstorm if the paper is too much. By fnord12 | February 13, 2017, 5:21 PM | Liberal Outrage Reference from SuperMegaMonkeyI've written before about Amazon, but this article is a really good illustration of what the dangers of Amazon becoming a monopoly are. The article is actually much bigger than that, and it's pretty scary in general.... Read More: Amazon's arbitrary pricing |