amazon’s trickle down monopoly

Data & Society — Amazon’s Trickle-Down Monopoly

Amazon’s Trickle-Down Monopoly shows that it is by eliciting and constraining the agency of small business owners — rather than simply eliminating them — that Amazon has gained its power over global retail.

i have had a tab open for this for quite a while, anticipating that i would get my act together to start blogging again and maybe have something to say about it.

the ecosystem that amazon has built is kind of fascinating to me as much as i am repelled by it. i probably have a bit of a chip on my shoulder on what the nature of a small business should be, and so in some ways businesses built atop amazon feel less real to me, much like saying that someone participating in an multi-level marketing scheme is not someone i would consider a small business.

another aspect of this that interests me is the different levels that you can think about when looking at amazon’s business. i see a lot of violence in how the small players in the ecosystem can get ground up by the machinations that have a logic derived from massive scale.

this paper provides a fairly academic history and way of thinking about how the third-party seller marketplace has developed.