Yeah I agree. A lot of large companies can invest deeply just to drive out their competition. WalMart famously did the same to drive out other businesses in the 90s and 00s.
I think though we need to recognize that Amazon is succesful for a reason, and those reasons are why they are in a position to invent even deeper and more relentlessly...
The thing to recognize (or at least something I feel is under-recognized) is that Capitalism prefers monopolies or monopsonies, whichever the case may be. Capitalism talks a big game about the benefits of competition, but history tell us that it is actually their enemy. It reminds me of a Big Lie:
No thanks, the internet has fundamentally changed society. Software companies can now steal software and hack everyones machine on an unprecedented scale.
The last 20 years of PC gaming has been one of theft and grand larceny by steam, valve, EA and co. We used to get dedicated servers and level editors in games.
The internet allows companies to steal software from the point of production, because 2 or more computers in a network act as a single machine. So that means the internet is one giant world sized computer that companies de-facto own and control because they now "issue commands" to other nodes in the network.
We now live in a digital authoritarian society where we must get permission to use our software and have no privacy if we want to participate in the culture.
AKA the internet has been the greatest force for software theft and dispossession in all human history.
Because of the criminal way in which IP law was coded the public never got any property rights and this has created the greatest human rights disaster in all of history.
DRM in the OS, apps or games is literally you living in an open air prison and CEO's and government orgs can literally spy on everything you do.
Windows 10 is a case in point. There's no reason for client-server software anything for a home user.
>The last 20 years of PC gaming has been one of theft and grand larceny by steam, valve, EA and co. We used to get dedicated servers and level editors in games.
We used to have to deposit a quarter every time our character died, and with zero save points.
Trying to conflate arcade games with games you software you buy are non comparable, trying to justify theft of software when the population clearly doesn't want drm or authoritarian software as a service models.
Steam would have never got off the ground in 2004 if we had portal technology, man would have gotten killed.
Is it still capitalism with strong antitrust? If so, why do capitalists keep chipping away at and denigrating antitrust laws? What about capitalism's concurrent drive: toward slavery for its workers? What about a third drive: zero taxes? Taken together, what is the benefit of the capitalist ideology at all, and to whom do those benefits accrue?
IMO, this is like asking "is it still a democracy if the people don't decide on every bill directly?" In a sense, the answer is no–but I still feel comfortable using the word democracy.
I'm going to keep going with this analogy—IMO, idolizing the idea of a completely unregulated market is akin to idolizing the governing structure of ancient Athens. Yes, the rules we've added over the past millennia make us less free in a way—but they also make for a more sustainable system. These refinements are a sign of maturity.
I hope that in this light we can agree that using the term "free market" as a cudgel is a sign of immaturity.
I think you're caught up in an is/ought conundrum though: "idolizing the idea of a completely unregulated market" is the discourse! That's the pro-side rhetoric in a nutshell, how bills and laws get passed, and how the (US) economic system is constructed. So don't blame my inference, it's just what I'm reading in the newspaper.
I think though we need to recognize that Amazon is succesful for a reason, and those reasons are why they are in a position to invent even deeper and more relentlessly...