Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Whenever I read the replies on my popular tweets about Amazon, I realize that people have largely forgotten just how godawful online retail/delivery used to be. Maybe it's not fair to give Amazon *all* the credit, but it did force everybody else to raise their game substantially

I don’t think anyone is saying that Amazon isn’t a super convenient service and remarkable business. It’s dangerous to rely on singular, profit-driven and non-democratic entities for infrastructure-like services. Don’t have to want kerosene lamps to think PG&E is trash either.

It's dangerous to install single failure points. It's not a terrible idea to have a single leader who is leading as a direct result of being competent and reliable.

It's dangerous to get to a single failure point by removing all of the alternatives, too. This is the mechanic people are concerned about with Amazon. No monopoly arises via incompetence of the monopolist

It's very feasible to maintain a monopoly while being terrible at what you do if you're *not* terrible at fostering a regulatory environment in which it's functionally illegal to compete with you. That's a real danger. People patronizing businesses that perform great? Not so much

As it stands, Amazon looks like a monopoly *because* it stands head and shoulders above other online retailers. They're still out there, and if they could execute like Amazon we'd probably be seeing some very interesting biz battles

Agreed that Amazon got to #1 by being simply better. Now, though, some believe they are retaining #1 with the help of (not exclusively due to) anticompetitive practices. Whether or not it's true, that's the argument against Amazon. Not, "it's a bad/useless service."

Well, therein lies the rub. A popular narrative now is that no company could *possibly* dominate unless by anti-competitive practices, and that standard business practices suddenly fall into that basket as soon as a company cones out too far ahead.