![]() ![]() Of course, it is the most immediate and obvious separator of the two, but by peaking a little below the surface, you will discover that the unique elements of each stand out plainly to see. I don’t know for sure what this crisis will be, but I believe that most of us will be distracted from it until, just like Amazon or Apple, it becomes far too big to ignore.Size isn’t the only difference between small business ventures and large ones. However, the most opaque and pressing issue to small business, in my opinion, is the one quietly developing at this moment. It’s unclear which (if any) of these plans will actually come to fruition - it’s even less clear if they will have an effect on Amazon at all. ![]() Donald Trump’s approach to Amazon involves auditing the United States Postal Service, seemingly as a method of curtailing their uncompetitive distribution methods. As mentioned, Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Amazon and other big tech companies with antitrust policies, while Andrew Yang wants to make them pay more taxes through a value-added tax. Furthermore, it appears that a potential resistance to them is gaining momentum heading into election season. However, it looks as though these issues are gaining attention. After all, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to connect the focus on globalization with Apple and Amazon’s now notorious use of other countries as tax havens. What’s worse is that the aforementioned focus on decreased protectionism and encouragement of international trade may have made things worse. However, the astronomical growth of Amazon and its domination over struggling small businesses have been relatively unopposed, even while store after store has declared bankruptcy and closed their doors for good. Furthermore, future legal victories can establish a precedent affecting other digital storefronts, as well. The recent Supreme Court ruling is a major win for small app developers, who are now free to pursue a class action lawsuit in an attempt to open up Apple’s platform for more fair competition. At the time, policies like these were justified by big business moguls like then-UPS president Dan Brutto as “opening the doors to global trade,” which he considered “one of the best, but least talked about, ways of fostering small-business growth.” But what effect did these policies have on the present day?Īfter studying the reaction in the past to Apple’s closed platform software practices, I believe enough sustained attention was focused around this issue to allow for progress to be made. A notable attempt to repair the United States economy taken at the time was softening protectionist trade policies by removing a clause to “buy American” from an economic stimulus bill. įor the most part, concerned watchdogs and business advocates focused on different issues ten years ago, such as the devastating recession that was in full swing. And while Apple and AT&T’s attempts to prevent competition on their shared platform was also criticized, that story paled in comparison to the fervor over poor working conditions at iPhone manufacturing plants after a worker's alleged suicide. It’s true that Amazon was the subject of scrutiny, but it seemed to have more to do with potential collusion with Target and Walmart regarding below-cost pricing of new books. The intentions of these companies in the past betrayed their conclusions in the future, which is now our present. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that these issues didn’t just appear overnight. In an interview with Newsweek about the (at the time) recently released Amazon Kindle, Jeff Bezos stated that one of his company’s strategies for growth is to determine their future customers’ needs and then say “We're going to give that to them regardless of whether we currently have the skills to do so, and we will learn those skills no matter how long it takes.” At the same time, the impression left from a then-recent story of Apple rejecting the Google Voice app for the sake of their partner AT&T was that the company was “mired in the old think of protecting a lucrative business relationship, rather than letting the innovation chips fall where they may.” ![]() Well, the warning signs were certainly there for complete market domination. ![]()
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