I agree. There are similar laws for many other industries already that either prohibit or put operational restrictions such that their "on the platform" subsidiaries are on equal footing with competition.
Enron was breaking this principle when their energy traders would call up a power plant they also owned and ask for an unscheduled outage. I don't remember if this was specifically illegal in this case, but I used to have to take an online class once a year to remind me not to share any non-public data with marketing in one such regulated industry and that there would be serious consequences if this rule was broken.
Ok, honest question. Wouldn’t this just encourage conglomerate interests to capture the value outside the company? Seems like a logical place for a large PE funded wedge company if the opportunity was made available like that. Going from one player to two is very possible if we do something simplistic — it’s a big juicy target and a land grab if it’s simply divested. How can we insure a healthy diversity instead of the immediate reconsolidating that would come with a simple separation of interests?
I am for these changes, just asking the question I honestly worry about.
The distinction between platform and product is much hazier in software compared to physical industries.
For example, it’s taken for granted that most personal computing platforms have built in PDF viewers, but this wasn’t always the case and used to be a distinct product category (and still is to some extent). Similar for media players, some networking software, and spreadsheet apps.
Should Cloudflare be allowed to offer reverse CDN services for uploading content? Or would that unfairly compete with companies like Mux?
This doesn’t appear to be a response to or at all related to ISPs either owning the infrastructure or selling the service. What exactly is your point about ISPs here?
I love this question. Supposedly, Walmart does a significant amount of profit from their house brand which is, inspired by their suppliers in a similar way to Amazon.
As a Costco shopper, I am also quite likely to grab the Kirkland brand instead of the competitor.
Costco is maybe not the best example, because nearly every Kirkland product is a main name brand with a different name. It's almost never the case that Kirkland coffee (often made by Starbucks) is on the shelf next to an identical/equivalent coffee from, say, Folgers. Costco often only stocks one type of each product: they have Kirkland batteries (Duracell) but no Energizer (though they do sell other Duracell batteries at a higher cost).
Most supermarkets, on the other hand, work with manufacturers that aren't name brands, and almost exclusively sell their store brand alongside name brand products.
While I don't know what makes Amazon's practices different from what supermarkets do, my assumption is that placing two products adjacent on a shelf is very different then highlighting and promoting the store brand above and ahead of the competition. The store brand doesn't appear exclusively in recommendations or ads or come with a "Preferred" badge. The store also doesn't use sales data to decide which products to make a store brand for, with the goal of overtaking the name brand.
From what I understand most of those "house brand" products are made by the same factories of the on-brand stuff, probably but not necessarily with the same recipe and QC standards.
Product branding has almost no relationship to which company actually made the product, consumers are intentionally blinded to this information. I would appreciate regulation requiring products to be branded with the factory that made it; I think this would be a huge win for both consumers and workers but it would be firmly counter to the interests of major brands with a lot of political influence. Also many consumers would probably oppose this against their own rational interests because they have personal attachments to brands.
Grocery stores used to be marketplaces. Then in-house brands came along. The current iteration of grocery stores is Aldi, where everything they sell is an in-house brand.
