A huge corporation that’s tough to compete with

While most businesses suffered financially from the pandemic, some appear to have profited.

Online sales increased. The company benefiting most was Amazon, the foremost online shop.

Amazon is huge and it seems to be everywhere.

It is the largest internet company worldwide and the second biggest employer in the U.S.

It ships more packages than the U.S. Postal Service, provides movies and TV productions, publishes and sells books (controls half of all book sales) and manufactures numerous products.

The corporation has inserted itself into health care and food distribution, and there is much more.

Its greatest achievements may be the future, as it is one of the first into the field of artificial intelligence.

Amazon was launched in 1995 “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company where customers can find and discover anything they want to find online, and endeavour to offer the lowest price possible.”

A recent episode of the “Sunday Edition” (CBC) featured an interview with Stacy Mitchell, who was described as an anti-monopoly advocate in the U.S.

She has founded Athena to challenge Amazon’s grip on economic and political power.

It seems that one of the strengths of Amazon is its control over a large segment of the infrastructure which other companies use to deliver their online sales.

At the same time, it is competing against those users and trying to eliminate competition.

A major strategy of Amazon is to undersell competitors and thus force them out of the market.

Someone said that its aim is not to dominate the market but to be the market.

It is willing to lose billions of dollars in this way, knowing that will bankrupt other companies in the end, replacing them and recuperating its losses. It began with book sales.

Amazon’s growth and control is also possible because of the weakening of antimonopoly laws in the U.S. and other countries and/or the inability or unwillingness to enforce them. There has been a steady decline in the effect of anti-trust laws since the Ronald Reagan era

This enables Amazon and the other big players like Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft to take over more and more of the market.

For most of human history, our lives have been governed/ controlled by empires.

Google identifies 220 of them, with earliest one circa.3200 BC in Egypt.

An empire is described as a group of states under a single supreme authority.

While we may no longer have empires as such, there are still nation states which exercise power in the same way. Just look at China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Russia as examples.

An empire is also described as a large commercial organization owned or controlled by one person or a group. Such empires have no borders and it is harder to identify the extent of their power and the control they have over us. It is something we need to think about, especially with the rapid advances in technology. Everett Hobbs Conception Bay South