Seems like commenters are misreading the lawsuit here. My first instinct after reading the top paragraphs of Stoller's post was also "so what, this seems fine," but if you read to the end and see what the suit is really alleging, it's not just a policy that punished sellers for offering discounts on their products when sold off Amazon. It's the fact that Amazon is charging anywhere between 30-45% in fees to the sellers, which is much higher than other online marketplaces and obviously less than the 0% they'd charge themselves to sell through their own site (though they'd still need to pay money to operate the site), and
then punishing them if they sell somewhere else that has lower fees for a lower price.
That seems like legitimately monopolistic behavior and something that is illegal and should be stopped. The post is still misleading in that it doesn't mean Amazon is raising prices across the board by 30-45%. But they are raising prices across the board by whatever the delta is between their fees and WalMart's fees, or some other marketplace that charges even less, minus the difference in shipping.
Normally, market forces would solve this problem without any need for legal intervention, because some other marketplace like WalMart can just offer lower seller fees and attract all the sellers. But that doesn't happen precisely because Amazon's massive subscribed user base represents so much of the market that no can afford not to sell there, which is seemingly the definition of a monopoly and why legal intervention is called for. Lower-cost marketplaces can only compete if Amazon is not allowed to blackball sellers from access to the only customer base that matters.
That seems like legitimately monopolistic behavior and something that is illegal and should be stopped. The post is still misleading in that it doesn't mean Amazon is raising prices across the board by 30-45%. But they are raising prices across the board by whatever the delta is between their fees and WalMart's fees, or some other marketplace that charges even less, minus the difference in shipping.
Normally, market forces would solve this problem without any need for legal intervention, because some other marketplace like WalMart can just offer lower seller fees and attract all the sellers. But that doesn't happen precisely because Amazon's massive subscribed user base represents so much of the market that no can afford not to sell there, which is seemingly the definition of a monopoly and why legal intervention is called for. Lower-cost marketplaces can only compete if Amazon is not allowed to blackball sellers from access to the only customer base that matters.