Turns out Donald Trump isn't the only world leader with a tech billionaire "first buddy" who gets to serve as an unaccountable, self-interested de facto business regulator. UK PM Keir Starmer has just handed the keys to the British economy over to Jeff Bezos.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter
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Oh, not literally. But here's what's happened: the UK's Competitions and Markets Authority, an organisation charged with investigating and punishing tech monopolists (like Amazon) has just been turned over to Doug Gurr, the guy who used to run Amazon UK.
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This is - incredibly - even worse than it sounds. Marcus Bokkerink, outgoing head of the CMA, is amazing, and had charge over the CMA's Digital Markets Unit, the largest, best-staffed technical body of any competition regulator in the world. The DMU uses its investigatory powers to dig into complex monopolistic businesses like Amazon. Last year, the DMU got new enforcement powers that would let it custom-craft regulations to address tech monopolization (again, like Amazon's).
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But it's even worse. The CMA and DMU are the headwaters of a global system of super-effective Big Tech regulation. The CMA's deeply investigated reports on tech monopolists are used as the basis for EU regulations and enforcement actions, and these actions are then re-run by other world governments, like South Korea and Japan:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all
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The CMA is the global convener and ringleader in tech antitrust, in other words. Smaller and/or poorer countries that lack the resources to investigate and build a case against US Big Tech companies have been able to copy-paste the work of the CMA and hold these companies to account. The CMA invites (or used to invite) all of these competition regulators to its HQ in Canary Wharf for conferences where they plan global strategy against these monopolists:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cma-data-technology-and-analytics-conference-2022-registration-308678625077
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Firing the guy who is making all this happening and replacing him with Amazon's UK boss is a breathtaking display of regulatory capture by Starmer, his business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, and his exchequer, Rachel Reeves.
But it gets even worse, because Amazon isn't just any tech monopolist. Amazon is a many-tentacled kraken built around an e-commerce empire.
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Antitrust regulators elsewhere have laid bare how Amazon uses its retail monopoly to control whole economies, raising prices and crushing small businesses.
To understand Amazon's market power, first you have to understand "monopsonies" - markets dominated by buyers (monopolies are dominated by sellers - Amazon is a monopolist and a monopsonist). Monopsonies are far more dangerous than monopolies, because they are easier to establish and easier to defend against competitors.
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Say a single retailer accounts for 30% of your sales: there isn't a business in the world that can survive an overnight 30% drop in sales, so that 30% market share might as well be 100%. Once your order is big enough that canceling it would bankrupt your supplier, you have near-total control over that supplier.
Amazon boasts about this. They call it "the flywheel": Amazon locks in shoppers (by getting them to prepay for a year's worth of shipping in advance, via Prime).
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The fact that a business can't sell to a large proportion of households if it's not on Amazon gives Amazon near-total power over that business. Amazon uses that power to demand discounts and charge junk fees to the businesses that rely on it. This allows it to lower prices, which brings in more customers, which means that even more businesses have to do business with Amazon to stay afloat:
https://vimeo.com/739486256/00a0a7379a
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That's Amazon's version, anyway. In reality, it's a lot scuzzier. Amazon doesn't just demand deep discounts from its suppliers - it demand unsustainable discounts from them. For example, Amazon targeted small publishers with a program called the "Gazelle Project." Jeff Bezos told his negotiators to bring down these publishers "the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle":
https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/a-new-book-portrays-amazon-as-bully/
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The idea was to get a bunch of cheap books for the Kindle to help it achieve critical mass, at the expense of driving these publishers out of business. They were a kind of disposable rocket stage for Amazon.
Deep discounts aren't the only way that Amazon feeds off its suppliers: it also lards junk-fee atop junk-fee. For every pound Amazon makes from its customers, it rakes in 45-51p in fees:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute
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Now, just like there's no business that can survive losing 30% of its sales overnight, there's also no business that can afford to hand 45-51% of its gross margin to a retailer. For businesses to survive at all on Amazon, they have to jack their prices up - way up. However, Amazon has an anticompetitive deal called "most favoured nation status" that forces suppliers to sell their goods on Amazon at the same price as they sell them elsewhere (even from their own stores).
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So when companies raise their prices in order to pay ransom to Amazon, they have to raise their prices everywhere. Far from being a force for low prices, Amazon makes prices go up everywhere, from the big Tesco's to the corner shop:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos
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Amazon makes so much money off of this scam that it doesn't have to pay anything to ship its own goods - the profits from overcharging merchants for "fulfillment by Amazon" pay for all the shipping, on everything Amazon sells:
https://cdn.ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/AmazonMonopolyTollbooth-2023.pdf
Amazon competes with its own sellers, but unlike those sellers, it doesn't have to pay a 45-51% rake - and it can make its competitor-customers cover the full cost of its own shipping!
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On top of that, Amazon maintains the pretense that its headquarters are in Luxembourg, a tax- and crime-haven, and pays a fraction of the taxes that British businesses pay to HMRC (and that's not counting the 45-51% tax they pay to Jeff Bezos's monoposony).
That's not the only way that Amazon unfairly competes with British businesses, though: Amazon uses its position as a middleman between buyers and sellers to identify the most successful products sold by its own customers.
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Then it copies those products and sells them below the original inventor's costs (because it gets free shipping, pays no tax, and doesn't have to pay its own junk fees), and drives those businesses into the ground. Even Jeff "Project Gazelle" Bezos seems to understand that this is a bad look, which is why he perjured himself to the American Congress when he was questioned under oath about it:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58961836
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Amazon then places its knockoff products above the original goods on its search results page. Amazon makes $38b selling off placement on these search pages, and the top results for an Amazon search aren't the best matches for your query - they're the ones that pay the most. On average, Amazon's top result for a search is 29% more expensive than the best match on the site. On average, the top row of results is 25% more expensive than the best match on the site.
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On average, Amazon buries the best result for your search 17 places down the results page:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers
Amazon, in other words, acts like the business regulator for the economies it dominates. It decides what can be sold, and at what prices. It decides whose products come up when you search, and thus which businesses deserve to live and which ones deserve to die.
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An economy dominated by Amazon isn't a market economy - it's a planned economy, run by Party Secretary Bezos to benefit Amazon's shareholders.
Now, there is a role for a business regulator, because some businesses really don't deserve to live (they sell harmful products, engage in deceptive practices, etc). The UK has a regulator that's in charge of this stuff: the Competition and Markets Authority, which is now going to be run by Jeff Bezos's hand-picked UK Amazon boss.
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That means that Amazon is now both the official and the unofficial central planner of the UK economy, with a free hand to raise prices, lower quality, and destroy British businesses, while hiding its profits in Luxemourg and starving the exchequer of taxes.
The "first buddy" role that Keir Starmer just handed over to Jeff Bezos is, in every way, more generous than the first buddy deal Trump gave Elon Musk.
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Starmer's government claims they're doing this for "growth" but Amazon isn't a force for growth, it's force for extraction. It is a notorious underpayer of its labour force, a notorious tax-cheat, and a world-beating destroyer of local economies, local jobs, and local tax bases. Contrary to Amazon's own self-mythologizing, it doesn't deliver lower prices - it raises prices throughout the economy.
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@pluralistic
Monopsonies also suppress wages across entire industries
https://www.epi.org/unequalpower/publications/pervasive-monopsony-power-and-freedom-in-the-labor-market/
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/4/6/17204808/wages-employers-workers-monopsony-growth-stagnation-inequality
https://samhillman.substack.com/p/wage-determination-and-labour-market?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
AI algorithms are already being used like Harlan Crow's RealPage -- to manipulate the market in favor of monopolies
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2021/06/18/artificial-intelligence-has-caused--50-to-70-decrease-in-wages-creating-income-inequality-and-threatening-millions-of-jobs/
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230718-ai-artificial-intelligence-worker-wages-salaries
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-uber-driver-pay-algorithm-ontario/
Amazon sets wages in stone for warehouses, IT, & distribution systems in several countries.
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@pluralistic this info is so important and yet completely ignored by the public. It's crazy.
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@pluralistic good grief. What the hell are they doing
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@Flisty @pluralistic Divvying up the spoils of the oligarchs' successfully waged class war.
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@pluralistic Never voted for the guy, felt he would sell us out to America without even a vote and oh look, he has....
[#]Starmer #UKPOL #UKpolitics
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@Lazarou @pluralistic
Really awesome that Tony Blair turned Labour into Tory-light, isn't it? 😢
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@SaftyKuma @Lazarou @pluralistic and now Starmer is British Joe Biden.
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Thanks, Kier.
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@pluralistic please, you can hide the other parts of your thread and not spam the whole thread in the timeline. Or ask your admin to bump up the character limit of the instance.
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@Difficile
While intuitively it seems like this is how "unlisted" works, I assure you, that is not how it works, You've been given misinformation so pervasive that it constitutes the fediverse's first urban legend.
Here's an explanation of how unlisted works, how threading works, and how to manage threads in your timeline:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads/
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@pluralistic @Difficile I refer you to this github issue on the mastodon code adeptly called "the doctorow problem":
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8615
We've been begging for a way to "fold" subtoot threads out of the main timeline, but as yet no movement on this issue...
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@bensb@genomic.socialI love that its actually called the Doctorow problem.
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@bensb @pluralistic @Difficile is there a way somehow somewhere to sponsor development of specific features? I'd throw some €€€ to support the implementation of that feature... and others! I like the idea that users can call for future developments, and when possible also contribute financially.
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@bensb @pluralistic @Difficile I really miss the days when we could just easily customize our clients to do this kind of thing for us.
Load a script into (or write a script for) mIRC and voilà: sub-optimal behaviour redefined.
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@bensb @pluralistic @Difficile
The fact that there is now a "doctorow problem" based on his threads suggests maaaaaaaybe that a technical solution isn't the only possibility?
Personally I set up a filter to hide all the rest of the posts. But I think it might be something to consider for @pluralistic as well. Maybe just post a few chunks and send people to your blog if they want to keep reading?
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@Charlesflorian @bensb @Difficile
Absolutely not.
The first line in my bio is "I post long threads."
If you don't want long threads, you shouldn't follow me.
I also publish the threads in many formats, including machine-readable fulltext RSS. They are licensed CC BY. There are many ways to get my work without reading it here if you disprefer threads on Mastodon and I won't be offended if that's what you prefer.
But to quote my bio: "I post long threads." That's what this account is for.
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@pluralistic @Charlesflorian @bensb Thanks for all the info and clearing out my misunderstandings, I did not read your bio (not following you) before posting so sorry for that and sorry for derailing your thread.
The easiest solution for my annoyance at threads is to just mute anyone posts them, I guess.
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@Difficile @bensb @Charlesflorian I fully support that solution.
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@pluralistic @Difficile Since I believed the legend until just now, I'm gonna screenshot the relevant paragraph from that post:
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@jef @pluralistic @Difficile thanks for this! I also got the wrong idea. In my case from the (otherwise fantastic) guide on mastodon threads by @FediTips - maybe it could be corrected there?
[#]feditps
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@skatan @jef @pluralistic @Difficile
I didn't write that it hid it from people who followed you, I wrote that it hides it from public timelines like Local and Federated and hides it from searches and followed hashtags:
https://fedi.tips/who-can-see-my-posts-in-mastodon-how-do-i-send-dms-in-mastodon/
The reason it's polite to use unlisted for replies in a thread is to stop filling Local, Federated and search results with massive numbers of posts from the same thread, especially as search results are shown in chronological order.
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@FediTips @skatan @jef @Difficile
As I wrote:
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@pluralistic @FediTips @skatan @jef @Difficile
Full-text search of your own posts is enabled for all of your posts when this is turned on for the instance. In addition, you can also full-text search any post from anyone so long as you've marked it in some way: bookmark, favorite, boost.
Lastly, Mastodon added a feature where you can opt-in your Public posts to full-text search as well. This will let people full-text search your Public posts, if you've opted in, whether they've interacted with the post or not.
Just to flesh out the picture there a bit.
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@pluralistic @FediTips @skatan @jef @Difficile Incidentally, Unlisted hashtags serve a different purpose, I find:
It becomes a directory to those hashtags, rather than included in searches as part of the directory itself.
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@pluralistic @skatan @jef @Difficile
It's your call what you want to do, I'm just trying to keep people aware of how this place works.
If you use public for all your posts, your posts will all show up in search results. Because search results appear in chronological order, lots of public posts back to back with similar search terms and/or hashtags could swamp results.
There is a search function on Mastodon, it requires opt-in to be indexed but not to see results:
https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-opt-into-or-out-of-full-text-search-on-mastodon
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@FediTips @pluralistic @jef @Difficile sorry for misquoting you!
I guess there are good arguments for both practices then and it's pretty much up to taste then...
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@jef
About 99% of Mastodon believe this and messes around with the visibility of posts, making the first "public" and the subsequent ones "unlisted".
No, people, you're not causing less "noise" in other people's timelines!
You're just making it impossible to search for specific topics in the thread.
I hate that (mostly because, I have explained this about 100 times, but they still do this shit)
@pluralistic @Difficile
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@mina @jef @pluralistic @Difficile You are making less noise in the local timeline of your instance. Which makes sense on instances with certain sizes, I guess
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@txo_elurmaluta
And you're making people miss out on stuff.
Not always, all the goodies are in the first toot, and you're making the entire network less useful.
I reckon, the "quiet public" makes sense for things that just don't matter.
BTW: The local timeline (at least on my instance) only shows posts, not replies.
@jef @pluralistic @Difficile
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@mina
Eh. Just accept that you can't see everything.
@txo_elurmaluta @jef @pluralistic @Difficile
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@mina @jef @pluralistic @Difficile You are right, although the searchability of Mastodon is another not-so-easy subject 😐
Also I wouldn't know which thing do really matter and which not, I don't know.
I have to double check on my instance about the local timeline and replays, tho. Thanks.
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@txo_elurmaluta
I know, many people dislike the "search" feature, and on the other hand it is nowhere as good as it is on data-hoarding commercial platforms.
It's a fine line.
I actually would like a search platform for public posts like we had back in the day with DejaNews for the Usenet, but for other people, this would be a nightmare.
@jef @pluralistic @Difficile
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@mina @jef @pluralistic @Difficile I did try and, in our instance, replies to other people don't show, but replies to yourself when doing a thread they do show.
Ok, at least I wasn't doing the thing for nothing 😅
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@pluralistic @Difficile thanks for posting this. Getting tips on how to handle reading threads is super helpful. It was the one thing that kept me on twitter so long. And yes, composing in stanzas. I really like reading your essays in stanza format.
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@pluralistic @Difficile can we as groups of users, sponsor some new features we'd like to see developped and added to mastodon/clients? If there was an organisation somewhere listing and managing bounties for implementing features, I would 100% throw money into it.
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@pluralistic @Difficile Most of the time I use a web-native (client-side JS) client called phanpy.social, which does threads correctly.
It keeps self-reply threads in chronological order and collapses them. I wish the native-native clients and official web frontend would do this. It just makes sense.
I created an "app shortcut" to the page in Firefox on Android and it works just fine. Notifications, too.
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@aaronbieber @pluralistic @Difficile +1. I do the same. This web app is the best Android client. I use it on the desktop too.
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@Difficile I have a filter set up to hide posts with that text @pluralistic puts on all his mid-thread posts from my timeline. That way I only see the first one and any replies he boosts, but I can look at the whole thing manually if I open it up
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@Difficile
Yeah I unfollewed his fediverse account and switched to RSS because of the long threads in reverse order.
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@pluralistic I’ll be writing to my MP about this. Here’s how to do it if anyone else also feels inspired to:
https://www.writetothem.com
They might like to know that they’re on course to lose their job in a few years’ time with this behaviour.
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text/gemini
