 For the term paper students will choose an article related to any of the topics we have covered in the online coursework. The articles could be found on msnbc.com, nytimes.com, economist.com., cnn.

Written on May 25, 2021, the article goes into why the attorney general for the District of Columbia sued Amazon. The article claims that Amazon has broken many antitrust regulations that unfairly crush its competition. Amazon is not the first to face a lawsuit for breaking antitrust laws, rather the company now joins other powerful tech giant companies like Google and Facebook in this new legal battle. The centerpiece of Rancine’s lawsuit revolves around the claims made directly by many of the independent merchants on Amazon’s digital mall. If these sellers list their products at a lesser price on their own websites or on another shopping site, Amazon punishes them by making the product all but invisible on Amazon’s site. Such anticompetitive practices allow Amazon to dictate prices across all shopping sites, thereby making prices higher for consumers. The author continues by directly quoting Amazon’s defense at why the company has full freedom to hide products that are not competitively priced. The company does not view its actions as a transgression, nor does it take a stance on whether its actions are right or wrong in the market economy. The article finishes by describing how the White House intends to build its legal grounds by highlighting how Amazon threatens its competition to raise prices. My personal stance generally agrees with the majority of the arguments made in the article. Amazon undoubtedly participates in anti-competitive practices. Although the company tries to defend itself by claiming that sellers are free to list their products at whatever price they want, this doesn’t justify Amazon’s subsequent response as fair or competitive. This response being that when merchants price their products lower on their own site, Amazon makes this prospective product almost disappear from the Amazon marketplace. While companies technically have the legal freedom to do what they want, Amazon leaves them with no choice but to list their lowest prices on Amazon’s website. This creates a system which allows Amazon to dominate the online shopping market as products have the lowest prices on its website. However , this in turn raises prices for all consumers. I believe this is textbook anti-competitive behavior .

2 Moreover , the author shows a slight bias against Amazon, as it does not defend the company’ s actions and provides strong evidence for the lawsuit. However , the author does close off the article by saying it is unsure whether or not tech giants like Amazon leave consumers better or worse of f. I, on the other hand, disagree with the author ’s claims of Amazon being a monopoly . Firstly , the author cites Amazon as hurting the public in the same way that Carnegie steel and V anderbilt railroads did. Our textbook defines a monopoly as a firm that acts as “the sole seller of its product and if [the] product does not have any close substitutes“ (Ovide, 2021). However , the products that are sold on Amazon have similar products which are easily available on other marketplaces. Moreover , monopolies act as inflationary forces. While the author believes that Amazon raises prices for consumers, I once again disagree. For years, consumers gravitated towards Amazon for its commendable lower prices. Under this, Amazon is actually a deflationary force with its lower prices. This is easily distinguishable from a monopoly with higher prices. This being said, Amazon still exhibits some monopolistic practices like lowering competition by threatening independent merchants on the market. I believe that Amazon fits better under the title of a natural monopoly in which “a single company can supply a product or service at a lower cost than any potential competitor , and at a volume that can service an entire market” (Investopedia, 2022). While other competitors still exist,Amazon could single handedly supply the entire market. This is a key portion of the article to which my views dif fered from that of the author ’s. This article focuses heavily on competition and its role in the markets. A robust American economy depends on healthy market competition. Economic fundamentals show that when businesses must compete for customers, the result is cheaper pricing, better goods and services, more variety , and more innovation. Monopolies, on the other hand, strive to eliminate competition which lowers economic ef ficiency. Thus, monopoly markets lead to products costing more than they should because of the loss of competition. This raises consumer prices and creates an economic loss to society . As members of society , we have a duty to focus on our social and civic responsibilities. Social and civic responsibility require us to help shape society in a positive manner with our actions. However , by fueling big tech companies that have monopolistic practices like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, we are failing our society . It is vital that we educate ourselves on the 3 negative impact antitrust practices have on society and do our best to avoid rewarding their behavior .

4 Citations Mankiw , N. G. (2021). Principles of Economics. 9th Edition. Boston, MA: Cengage.

Natural Monopoly Definition . (2022, March 21). Investopedia. https://www .investopedia.com/terms/n/natural_monopoly .asp#:%7E:text=What%20Is%2 0a%20Natural%20Monopoly%3F Ovide, S. O. (2021, May 25). The Big Deal in Amazon’s Antitrust Case . The New York Times. Retrieved June 26, 2022, from https://www .nytimes.com/2021/05/25/technology/amazon-antitrust-lawsuit.html?smid=u l-share 5 Article https://www .nytimes.com/2021/05/25/technology/amazon-antitrust-lawsuit.html The New York Times The Big Deal in Amazon’s Antitrust Case- by Shira Ovide Published May 25, 2021 Updated June 22, 2021 Hoo boy, this is a moment. A government authority in the United States has sued Amazon over claims that the company is breaking the law by unfairly crushing competition.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by the attorney general for the District of Columbia, joins the recent government antitrust cases against Google and Facebook. These lawsuits will take forever, and legal experts have said that the companies likely have the upper hand in court.

The D.C. attorney general, Karl Racine, however, is making a legal argument against Amazon that is both old-school and novel, and it might become a blueprint for crimping Big Tech power.

It’s a longstanding claim by some of the independent merchants who sell on Amazon’s digital mall that the company punishes them if they list their products for less on their own websites or other shopping sites like Walmart.com. Those sellers are effectively saying that Amazon dictates what happens on shopping sites all over the internet, and in doing so makes products more expensive for all of us. Racine has made this claim a centerpiece of his lawsuit. Amazon has said before that merchants have absolute authority to set prices for the products they sell on its site, but that ignores that the company has subtle levers to make merchants’ products all but invisible to shoppers. If a merchant lists a product for less on another site, Amazon can respond by making it more cumbersome for a shopper to buy the item.

Amazon, in a statement to my colleagues, said that merchants have the freedom to list and price their products however they wish, but that Amazon can chose “not to highlight” products that are not competitively priced.

6 Why is the attorney general’s claim a big deal?

Legal experts have said that it’s tricky to sue technology giants for breaking antitrust laws. That’s partly because of the ways U.S. competition laws have been written, interpreted and enforced over the decades. But the lawsuit against Amazon bypasses this by saying that the tech giant hurts the public the same way that 19th-century railroads and steel giants did — by strong-arming competition and raising prices at will.

Last year, the legal scholar and Big Tech critic Tim Wu told me that he believed that those price claims were the strongest potential antitrust case against Amazon on legal grounds. (He has since been picked to advise the White House on corporate competition issues.) I don’t know if any of these lawsuits against Big Tech will succeed at chipping away at the companies’ tremendous influence. And I can’t definitively say whether we’re better or worse off by having a handful of powerful technology companies that make products used and often loved by billions of people.

It has been remarkable, though, to see the evolution of thinking among some of the public and politicians, from justified awe of these companies and what they make to questioning the downsides of technologies and the at-times brazen companies behind them.

It’s a sometimes unfair and noisy mess. But remember why we got to this point:

Technology giants are among the most powerful forces in our world, and the price of power is scrutiny .