1. Great piece on how Amazon exploits its dual role as dominant marketplace & seller that “competes” with the firms dependent on its infrastructure. Recognizing this dual role creates intractable conflicts of interest, lawmakers have previously banned it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-competition-shopify-wayfair-allbirds-antitrust-11608235127

2. As WSJ & House report show, Amazon exploits these conflicts in a host of ways. E.g., It routinely uses merchants' confidential sales data to roll out replica goods & then privilege its own. Amazon claims it prohibits this, but its docs suggest otherwise https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/competition_in_digital_markets.pdf

3. WSJ notes that Amazon uses authenticity checks to collect sensitive business info it can then use to locate suppliers & copy products. One merchant told the House that Amazon in theory allows sellers to omit price info, but in practice Amazon has rejected "altered" docs.

4. Studying Amazon's business practices reveals a panoply of ways Amazon exploits its role as a dominant marketplace to advantage itself in adjacent lines of business. Technological advances enable Amazon to exploit the conflicts in new ways, but the basic dynamic is not new.

5. Investigating railroads' expansion into commodity markets, a congressional committee in 1893 concluded: “No competition can exist between two producers of a commodity when one of them has the power to prescribe both the price and output of the other.”

6. Lawmakers then prohibited dominant railroads from transporting goods that they owned. There's a long tradition of prohibiting dominant intermediaries from entering markets that pit them against dependent firms. I examine a few cases here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3180174

7. Structural separations were often paired with nondiscrimination requirements. The animating principle was to ensure that dominant intermediaries are not conflicted. Amazon's conduct is a case study in why we need to extend these rules to dominant players in digital markets.