Posted by kmfrk 7 hours ago
RICO is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...
It lists plenty of crimes, but anti-trust violations isn't one of them.
Also, obligatory https://web.archive.org/web/20170301062028/https://www.popeh...
See specifically sections "Wait. Isn't the defendant the enterprise?" and "So what's "racketeering activity"?"
Radical leftist lunatic antifa terrorists that want to see this country DESTROYED!!
As opposed to Most Favored Monopoly contracts, which are glorious Capitalism.
Know the difference!
Rico as written and enforced walks right up to the limit of constitutionality in a dozen ways. It's built for speed. It's never really been thrown into a knock down drag out legal action between titans on equal footing (i.e. a bigco legal team, potentially helped by other bigcos). It might survive nominally but it probably won't come out the other end in serviceable condition. You might win a few but eventually an appeal will find its target and end your day.
I say go for it. Heads I win. Tails you get RICO reform.
Lots of retailers (both physical & online) have similar requirements, and many manufacturers have similar requirements for minimum advertised prices (such as Apple). I think the California AG's plan is to argue that the pricing rules combined with Amazon's large market share merit a judgement against them, but it's going to be an uphill battle to single out one company for practices that are common to the industry.
1. https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/2022-...
2. https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/REDAC...
My understanding (IANAL) is that that is illegal, and those retailers should be prosecuted as well. That is essentially price fixing, because the retailer is enforcing their competitors have the same price, using the supplier as an intermediary.
> many manufacturers have similar requirements
That is a different situation, and is AFAICT legal in the US (but not in many other countries, and IMHO probably shouldn't be legal), at least in some situations, but there are limits.
The original wording was
>Amazon requires that anyone selling through their platform not offer lower prices elsewhere online.
which means if the seller offers to sell something on amazon for $x, but has a shopify site selling it for < $x, then that seller will get deranked. That's not the same thing as the lowest price, because it's possible that other sellers sell for higher prices, and some people might not find whatever obscure shopify site that has the lowest price.
The wording is admittedly ambiguous, but the fact that there are totally overpriced items available on amazon suggests amazon isn't deranking people just because it's not the best price on the internet.
I didn’t see anything in the article suggesting Amazon ask for the 2nd option, just examples of sellers who did the 2nd one.
Did Amazon think they were too big to convict?
I wonder if they will meet the fate of Standard Oil, back in the day.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/robert-borks-america...
(BTW that source is right-wing and can hardly be said to be biased against Bork).
And can't we do a class-action lawsuit against Amazon at this point?
A major part of the problem isn't even that we don't have laws on the books, it's that funding to the enforcement agencies has been gutted to the point where they can mostly just go after extreme egregious violations or very easy to win cases. The IRS is in exactly the same boat.