In my neighborhood, I frequently walk past “shop local” signs in the windows of struggling stores. Yet I don’t feel guilty ordering most of my family’s household goods on Amazon. In a world of fair competition, there will be winners and losers. But when a mail truck pulls up filled to the top with Amazon […]
How to Keep Amazon from Eating Your Business, Too…
It has become a truism that software is eating the world. Perhaps that now extends to Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods. This purchase is surely funded in part by the astronomical growth of Amazon Web Services, which is estimated to have made $14 billion in revenue last year — just slightly more than the purchase […]
Amazon Eats Up Whole Foods as the New Masters of the Universe Plunder America…
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” —Justice Louis Brandeis With his $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has made clear his determination to dominate every facet of mass retailing, likely at the […]
With New Patent, Amazon Will Collect As Much Customer Data As Google…
Amazon Granted a Patent That Prevents In-Store Shoppers from Online Price Checking…
Amazon’s long been a go-to for people to online price compare while shopping at brick-and-mortars. Now, a new patent granted to the company could prevent people from doing just that inside Amazon’s own stores. The patent, titled “Physical Store Online Shopping Control,” details a mechanism where a retailer can intercept network requests like URLs and […]
Major U.S. Tech Firms Press Congress for Internet Surveillance Reforms…
Facebook, Amazon and more than two dozen other U.S. technology companies pressed Congress on Friday to make changes to a broad internet surveillance law, saying they were necessary to improve privacy protections and increase government transparency. The request marks the first significant public effort by Silicon Valley to wade into what is expected to be […]
Amazon Launches Surveillance System, Calls it “A Hands-Free Camera and Style Assistant”…
Hey all you dumbshits who expose SMB to the Internet on unpatched Windows boxes: Your new, “hands-free camera and style assistant” is here. *wink* *wink*…
“The Retail Bubble Has Now Burst”: A Record 8,640 Stores Are Closing in 2017…
The devastation in the US retail sector is accelerating in 2017, and in addition to the surging number of brick and mortar retail bankruptcies, it is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in the soaring number of store closures. While the shuttering of retail stores has been a frequent topic on this website, most recently in […]
Is It Time to Break Up Google?…
In just 10 years, the world’s five largest companies by market capitalization have all changed, save for one: Microsoft. Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Citigroup and Shell Oil are out and Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon and Facebook have taken their place. They’re all tech companies, and each dominates its corner of the […]
The Massive Monopolies of Google, Facebook and Amazon, and Their Role in Destroying Privacy, Producing Inequality and Undermining Democracy…
Most of us are active on Facebook, use many of Google’s assets (search, YouTube, calendar) and get Amazon products dropped at our doorsteps. But have we ever stopped to think about the enormous impact these three companies have had on our lives and our society? Well, Jonathan Taplin has given it a lot of thought. […]