This is troublesome.

[conuly]

In the wake of Amazonfail there were a few mentions of other problems with Amazon. They've largely been ignored, but I thought enough about it to go straight to Google, which lead me straight to Wikipedia. (Honestly, sometimes I don't know why I even *bother* with Google!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com#Controversies

Some of this I've seen elsewhere, like in the Times, where I can only hope they did basic fact-checking. The tax thing, definitely, and the thing about self-publishing, I knew that. But unions? Bullying publishers? Some of these things aren't easily explained away as a "glitch", nor as easily fixed.

So other than do a lot of research (does anybody else get the doing-things bug when they're PMSy, or is that just me?), I don't know what I'm going to do, ultimately.

If nothing else, I'm expanding my online shopping (when I shop online) to other retailers. I always *say* we should support small businesses, but I too often, I think, take the convenient and easy route.

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

I've been boycotting since the turn of the century over their patent issues. It's a shame that the noamazon site went down years ago. It was a great site. It was dedicated to explaining the problems with Amazon and containing links to other providers for the different services that Amazon offers that you could use instead.

Maybe this will spur someone to recreate a resource like that.

[conuly]

The patent business is going right over my head.

[leora.livejournal.com]

The US patent system is a really big mess of problems based on a good idea. But one of the ideas is that you should be able to patent clever ideas and profit off of them. However, if an idea is obvious and anyone would come up with it as an obvious application of what you're doing, then you shouldn't be able to patent it.

Amazon tried to patent one-click shopping. The idea of a customer having an online shopping cart they can add items to and just click buy on items and add them to their cart through identifying cookies and then check out and buy everything in the cart.

This was viewed by many people, myself included, as an obvious application of the technology. They may have been the first to set it up, but it wasn't exactly a brilliant idea. If you're setting up a big online store, it's an obvious thing to do. Someone had to be first though.

But with a patent they could try to charge every other company on the net that wanted to use online shopping baskets. This would massively hurt online business.

They failed at their attempt, but they still tried to cripple e-commerce.

Google has the whole try not to be evil thing going for them. Amazon didn't seem to ever try not to be evil. They always seem to have been about making as much money they can by any means available to them. They aren't evil in the sense of actively seeking to harm people. They're more completely uncaring about the potential harmful effects of their actions beyond the money they make.

Many people view this as basically the definition of a company, but I don't. A lot of the businesses I support aren't that way, and I don't think it's unreasonable to try to aim for higher standards. Anyway, Amazon is big and they have no moral compass, so giving them any more power scares me. Even if another company is equally amoral, spreading the power out is safer. Concentration of power isn't always bad, but it really requires the power to be in good hands. And they have never given any signs of being good.

[conuly]

Ah, that makes sense.

Did you know they don't even apparently donate to charity? I mean, unless they do it on the sly, but who does that?

[ironychan.livejournal.com]

I just want to note how much I love the fact that we can now talk about 'the turn of the century'. It's such an awesome phrase!

[leora.livejournal.com]

And easier to spell than millennium.

[conuly]

I keep having to stop and think and remember it doesn't mean the early 1900s. And we're almost out of this decade, even! When the heck did THAT happen???