some people’s news choices begin and end on Facebook. Does that mean Facebook would have a monopoly on news if it that market shared increased enough? What’s stopping people from just typing in a non Amazon.com address into their browser?
I get maybe for the older population but that’d put a 10-20 year cap on Amazon dominance before the majority of their customer base understands the internet enough to look for alternatives if amazons service isn’t good enough.
You ask that about Facebook and thanks to the recent outage we can already see that YES Facebook is having a significant impact on traffic to non-Facebook news sites. When Facebook went down earlier this month there was a 40% spike in traffic to news sites during the outage.
Now imagine a company that has been just as effective as Facebook at replacing/consuming/killing it's competition in the retail space and you've got Amazon. If Amazon went down for a proportional extended period, say for a few days, you'd likely see a massive spike in sales at other retailers just as we saw a massive spike in new site traffic when Facebook was down.
I get maybe for the older population but that’d put a 10-20 year cap on Amazon dominance before the majority of their customer base understands the internet enough to look for alternatives if amazons service isn’t good enough.