Still, they are the monopoly marketplace online. They should be doing _everything_ to avoid looking like they are abusing their monopoly position to muscle into other fields. The fact that they don't seem too bothered just seems to indicate to me that regulators are not prepared to act on them.
Really the rule should simply be that if you operate a market place you can't sell on it. Full stop. Then we could simply be happy that amazon is finally improving it's search and/or the quality of its listings.
I think a lot of people are missing the point that Amazon controls so much market share now that actions that aren't anti-competitive if you have 1% market share are when you control 50%+.
Amazon still has quite a ways to go. Consider that Microsoft had:
- 96% of worldwide OS marketshare. Even Amazon doesn't come close to this level of domination in retail or cloud.
- Forcing OEMs to purchase Windows licenses for all PCs sold regardless of whether or not customers wanted a PC without Windows.
- Not only pre-installed IE, but provided IE with inaccessible and undocumented Windows OS APIs to give it functionality that just wasn't possible for Netscape to implement (like ActiveX).
Really the rule should simply be that if you operate a market place you can't sell on it. Full stop. Then we could simply be happy that amazon is finally improving it's search and/or the quality of its listings.