> I just have a hard time understanding how it is any different than brick and mortar companies using their sales data to determine which products they should have a store brand version of. Costco, Walmart, Target, etc. all do this, and have been doing it for decades.
The legal difference underlying the lawsuit between this behavior by Amazon and the behavior you raise by those stores is not the behavior, but its context.
Amazon, the complaint alleges, has durable monopolies in two relevant markets which the behavior leverages and reinforces, making it a means of illegally maintaining a monopoly.
The other stores do not have monopolies, so the behavior is not part of a system of illegally maintaining a monopoly.
This is very similar to the kind of discussion that happened at the time of the Microsoft antitrusts suit about bundling software: one of the ways Microsoft illegally leveraged their Windows monopoly – in this case to monopolize other markets rather than to maintain the Windows monopoly, but same kind of issue – was bundling IE with Windows. People made all kinds of “well, how is this different than maker A bundling software X with software Y”, and mostly it wasn’t, except that maker A didn’t have and thus wasn’t leveraging a monopoly in the market of software X, so them bundling software Y with it wasn’t an issue.
> Amazon does not have a monopoly on online shopping that’s absurd.
“That's absurd” is an inadequate rebuttal to pp. 39-71 of the complaint detailing the basis for the claim Amazon has durable market power in two relevant markers.
> We need to move away from the term "monopoly" (which may not literally be a mono) and towards anti-competitive.
Anti-trust rules cover both, with a (often complex to apply, because of the kinds of facts that need to be analyzed, but relatively well-developed) concept of “monopoly” which ultimately boils down to whether or not substitution happens in practice rather than whether there is exactly one firm ina descriptive market. There's no need to “move away” from one to the other.
The legal difference underlying the lawsuit between this behavior by Amazon and the behavior you raise by those stores is not the behavior, but its context.
Amazon, the complaint alleges, has durable monopolies in two relevant markets which the behavior leverages and reinforces, making it a means of illegally maintaining a monopoly.
The other stores do not have monopolies, so the behavior is not part of a system of illegally maintaining a monopoly.
This is very similar to the kind of discussion that happened at the time of the Microsoft antitrusts suit about bundling software: one of the ways Microsoft illegally leveraged their Windows monopoly – in this case to monopolize other markets rather than to maintain the Windows monopoly, but same kind of issue – was bundling IE with Windows. People made all kinds of “well, how is this different than maker A bundling software X with software Y”, and mostly it wasn’t, except that maker A didn’t have and thus wasn’t leveraging a monopoly in the market of software X, so them bundling software Y with it wasn’t an issue.