Dans un article du Journal of Corporation Law, les juristes Matthew Wansley et Samuel Weinstein décortiquent une pratique anti-compétitive utilisée à plusieurs reprises dans la Silicon Valley : les tarifications prédatrices.

In the last couple of weeks, a lot of people have found themselves Googling things like "best music service not Spotify." Things like #deletespotify have trended repeatedly. All of Spotify's competitors should send Joe Rogan a gift basket, really. But if users do leave Spotify, where will they go?

Amazon devrait voir sa capitalisation bondir de plus 200 milliards de dollars ce vendredi 4 février, l’équivalent de la dégringolade, la veille, de Meta, maison mère de Facebook. Le marché atteint des niveaux de volatilité considérables et la tech en est la première victime, constate Philippe Escande, éditorialiste économique au « Monde ».

Le géant du e-commerce n’en finit pas de faire des émules. Amazon s’est rendu indispensable, aux Etats-Unis particulièrement, et fait face à un feu nourri de critiques tant sur le plan environnemental que social. Comment ceux qui y travaillent peuvent lui résister, et contribuer diminuer son emprise sur leur vie et celle des consommateurs ? C’est la question à laquelle s’essaie la chercheuse Natina Vgontzas (@nantarsya – NYU University et AI Now Institute) dans un papier déposé sur RSSN, où elle invite à invite à une stratégie de « décroissance » de l’entreprise.

Entreprise tentaculaire, fondée sur le culte des algorithmes et du « client roi », Amazon emploie aujourd’hui près de 1,5 million de personnes dans le monde. Mais la vraie machine à cash n’est pas son site d’e-commerce : sans Amazon, des pans entiers du Web mondial disparaîtraient. Explication, en vidéo.

Anyone in doubt about the extent to which Amazon rules our lives—well beyond the things we buy—only needs to look at the spiraling effects of an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on Dec. 7, when everything from banking apps to home deliveries to Christmas lights suddenly blinked out.

AWS, which supplies nearly a third of all cloud computing services used by companies online, first reported an outage on the morning of Dec. 7; the problem lay in several network devices being flooded with a high volume of traffic from unknown sources. By the evening, AWS said on its status dashboard that it was still “working towards full recovery across services.” The following morning, the main outages had been fixed, although AWS remained slower than usual.

For much of the day of Dec. 7, therefore, a wide array of web-based services turned lethargic or comatose. Our daily routines have become thoroughly but invisibly reliant on cloud computing, so even a partial AWS problem can cause an astonishing suspension of our ordinary activities. Indeed, a particularly unlucky person might have found every single part of their day hit by the outage, bringing normal life to a grinding halt.

Leaked memo shows Amazon Music’s senior leadership didn’t want to go along with Amazon’s plan to manage out the bottom 6% of their workforce.

Amazon’s dominance of online retail means that small businesses have little choice but to rely on its site to reach consumers. This report finds that Amazon is exploiting its position as a gatekeeper to impose steep and growing fees on third-party sellers. Even as these exorbitant fees bankrupt sellers, they are generating huge profits for Amazon, a fact that the tech giant conceals in its financial reports. These profits are not only the spoils of Amazon’s monopoly power. They are the essential fuel that feeds its market-domination strategies, enabling it to absorb massive, predatory losses designed to lock-in market control and fund breakneck expansion.

Key Finding:

1) Amazon’s fees have grown sharply and are harming independent businesses.
2) Amazon relies on profits from seller fees to fund its monopolization and expansion strategies.
3) To end Amazon's exploitation of small business, policymakers must focus on structural solutions. (ndr : comme séparer ses différentes activités)