by BEN NORTON
US Big Tech corporations are like the feudal landlords of medieval Europe. These Silicon Valley monopolies own the digital land that the global economy is built on, and are charging higher and higher rents to use their privatized infrastructure.
Every other company – not just small businesses, but even relatively large ones – must pay rent to these corporate feudal lords.
Amazon takes more than 50% of the revenue of the sellers on its platform, according to a study by the e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.
Amazon’s cut of vendor revenue steadily rose from roughly 35% in 2016 to just over half as of 2022.
In fact, Amazon basically sets prices in markets by using its infamous “buy box”. The platform removes the button if a user sells a product at a price higher than those offered on competing websites.
A staggering 82-90% of purchases on Amazon use the buy box. So if a business does not list the price that Amazon wants, they won’t receive the buy box, and their sales will fall.
Neoclassical economists endlessly condemned the inefficiencies of the central planning of the Soviet Union, but apparently have little to say about the de facto price setting being done by neo-feudal corporate monopolies like Amazon.
A monopolist in the 20th century would have loved to control a country’s supply of, say, refrigerators. But the Big Tech monopolists of the 21st century go a step further and control all of the digital infrastructure needed to buy those fridges — from the internet itself to the software, cloud hosting, apps, payment systems, and even the delivery service.
These corporate neo-feudal lords don’t just dominate a single market or a few related ones; they control the marketplace. They can create and destroy entire markets.
Their monopolistic control extends well beyond just one country, to almost the entire world.
If a competitor does manage to create a new product, US Big Tech monopolies can make it disappear.
Geopolitical Economy for more