Take Amazon: to fix Amazon, we need policy solutions. We need to ban predatory pricing – selling goods below cost to keep competitors out of the market (and then jacking them up again). We need to impose structural separation on the company so it can either be a platform, or compete with the sellers that rely on it as a platform. We need to curb its junk fees, which suck 45-51 cents on every dollar merchants take in. We need to end its most favoured nation deal, which forces merchants who raise their prices on Amazon to pay these fees to raise their prices everywhere else, too. We need to unionise its drivers and warehouse workers. We need to treat its rigged search results as the fraud they are.
The path to a better Amazon doesn’t lie through consumer activism, or appeals to the its conscience. Corporations, being artificial, immortal colony-organisms that use humans as their inconvenient gut flora, do not have consciences to appeal to. The path leads through coalitions: of consumers and merchants who are tired of being robbed; of workers who are tired of being immiserated and maimed; of competitors who are tired of being strong-armed by a monopolist bully; of tax-justice activists who are tired of trillion-dollar multinationals ducking their obligations. Systemic problems have systemic solutions, not individual ones. You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly. {read}