Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws?
Amazon has a team called &quot;Amazon Profitability Group&quot;. I used to work for said team, albeit only briefly.<p>The purpose of the team is to calculate the proper price to sell items for, the &quot;discount&quot; to vendors, and the items to put in the &quot;buy box&quot; in order to make the most profit for Amazon. I think the what is described here in the article is only the tip of the iceberg. Amazon isn&#x27;t doing something as simplistic as cutting out the competition with low prices... they are feeding all the numbers into neural networks and analyzing and predicting competition and profits, and then doing what the systems tell them is the most profitable.<p>That is, anything that Amazon can predict will make them more money or gain more market share... they are doing. I have full confidence that they are doing all of the terrible things outlined and more. The bigger question is whether government and law allow them to continue doing this. I think that it will continue to be allowed, despite being super shady and destroying both small and medium size businesses.<p>It cannot easily be proven that there is anyone orchestrating the monopolistic processes, because Amazon has essentially turned the process of dominating the market into an equation and they just do what the equation tells them to.<p>Amazon will claim &quot;we are just being smarter; we mean no harm&quot;, and without providing open minutes of their internal discussions it will be impossible to prove wrongdoing.<p>What is needed is open accountability for internal plans, but that is against the &quot;American way&quot; so I doubt it will happen anytime soon.