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Cory Doctorow

The only notice the company took of Release Energy was in its logistics and manufacturing department - the part of the business that extracts the monopoly rents at issue in the FTC case - which tracked Butler down in order to sell him these services.

The drivers whose piss Butler collected don't work directly for Amazon, they work for a #DeliveryServicePartner. These DSPs are victims of a pyramid scheme that Amazon set up.

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6 comments
Cory Doctorow

DSP operators lease vans and pay to have them skinned in Amazon livery and studded with Amazon sensors. They take out long-term leases on depots, and hire drivers who dress in Amazon uniforms. Their drivers are minutely monitored by Amazon, down to the movements of their *eyeballs*.

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Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

But none of this is "Amazon" - it's all run by an "entrepreneur," whom Amazon can cut loose without notice, leaving them with unfairly terminated employees, outstanding workers' comp claims, a fleet of Amazon-skinned vehicles and unbreakable facilities leases:

pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/rev

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Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Speaking to #Wired, Amazon denied that it forces its drivers to piss in bottles, but Butler clearly catches a DSP dispatcher telling drivers "If you pee in a bottle and leave it [in the vehicle], you will get a point for that" - that is, the part you get punished for isn't the peeing, it's the leaving.

Amazon's defense against the FTC is that it spares no effort to keep its marketplace safe.

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Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

As Amazon spokesperson #JamesDrummond says, they use "industry-leading tools to prevent genuinely unsafe products being listed." But the only industry-leading tools in evidence are tools to bust unions and screw suppliers.

In her landmark *Yale Law Review* paper, #AmazonsAntitrustParadox, FTC Chair #LinaKhan makes a brilliant argument that Amazon's alleged benefits to "consumers" are temporary at best, illusory at worst:

yalelawjournal.org/note/amazon

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Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

In Butler's documentary, Khan's hypothesis is thoroughly validated: here's a company extracting hundreds of billions from merchants who raise prices to compensate, and those monopoly rents are "invested" in union-busting and countermeasures against investigative journalists, while the tools to keep you from accidentally getting a bottle of piss in the mail are laughably primitive.

Truly, Amazon is the apex predator of the platform era:

pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

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Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

There are just three days left to back the #Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, *The Lost Cause*. These kickstarters are how I pay my bills, which lets me publish my free essays nearly every day. If you enjoy my work, please consider backing!

lost-cause.org

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