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Top-level
Cory Doctorow
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. 13/ 3 comments
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: https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator 15/
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! eof/ |
Gregory's Server
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:
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox
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