Is it time to break up Amazon?

Question

With Prime Video now stuffing ads into videos unless you pay an extra $2.99 a month, I'm wondering how this is not a classic anti-trust issue.After becoming the dominant logistics / hard goods player, they long ago bundled Video with that completely unrelated shipping benefits offering, and increased the price modestly.That seemed egregious enough, but now they are essentially diminishing the value of the product to their gain or forcing people to pony up a large percentage of the membership price to avoid the diminished experience, else give up the shipping benefits atogether.Shouldn't the DOJ be stepping in to look at, among other things, the unbundling of different services? Why aren't their pure streaming competitors complaining?What am I missing?

protocolture · Accepted Answer

Primes like the least interesting part of Amazon in terms of regulation. Their content base is pretty poor outside originals.
Prime needs regulation like Costco Petrol needs regulation. Video is a cool free bolt on to free shipping with its own bolt ons.
Amazon is scary for retail and cloud computing. Maybe start there.

ActorNightly · Answer

Amazon doesnt have a monopoly in any sector. Pretty hard to make an anti trust case against it

haaz · Answer

This is why we&rsquo;ll never have an all in one wechat app in the west.

chrispeel · Answer

If it's a "classic anti-trust issue", can you point to a similar company from the past that was successfully constrained by anti-trust regulation?