antitrust vs indie authors?
A very worried reader emailed to ask if I was worried that the recent antitrust hearings would negatively affect indie authors on Amazon.
Not really, no. I doubt it will have much effect for good or bad on indie authors, at least in the immediate future. Admittedly, I think it is very likely that Amazon and other “Big Data” companies are going to face new regulations, but there are too many variables to predict what will actually happen and how it will affect indie authors, and it may turn out to be nothing.
To start with, Amazon most likely does not qualify as a monopoly under current US law – Amazon has lots of competitors in every field in which it does business. It’s not even close to the biggest retailer in the US. Wal-Mart does three times Amazon’s sales, and Costco and Kroger are right behind Amazon. Even in cloud computing, where Amazon is pretty dominant, it still has heavyweight competitors in Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM, and Oracle. You might recall a recent news story where Microsoft beat out Amazon for a big Department of Defense data contract, and the courts recently ruled in Microsoft’s favor when Amazon tried to sue over it.
Calling Amazon a monopoly is one thing, but proving it in court in a way that will survive appeal is something else entirely.
For that matter, in the US it’s not technically illegal to be a monopoly, but it is very illegal to use monopoly power to raise prices on consumers, or to collude with competitors to raise prices on consumers. Apple and the Big Six publishers got into legal trouble for that at the start of the 2010s. By contrast, Amazon has pretty consistently tried to drive down consumer prices. Granted, they’ve frequently done that by squeezing their suppliers for every last cent, but the courts don’t mind that as much, and that’s been a standard practice among big retail chains for years. Everything that Amazon is accused of doing, Wal-Mart has also done, and frequently with a great deal more ruthlessness. If you’re old enough to remember, you may recall that back in the 1990s and early 2000s, Wal-Mart and Microsoft were the sinister corporate bogeymen the way that Amazon and Facebook are now. The wheel of history keeps on turning, and I imagine that some lifers at Microsoft are laughing that it’s Apple’s turn to get yelled at in front of Congress.
So, under current laws, I suspect Amazon won’t get in much trouble, though it might be forced to pay some fines or abandon some of its own retail brands like the “Amazon Basics” products.
That said, there might be a push to change the law or impose new regulations. Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook are very powerful companies in ways that no one could have imagined when antitrust laws first came along. None of them are really monopolies in the current legal sense, but they all have considerable amounts of power, and there’s starting to be rumblings on both the left and right factions of US politics that Something Needs To Be Done. Google and Facebook are probably more vulnerable to this, since they’ve made a lot of political enemies in a way that Apple and Amazon have not (and don’t have the same level of competition that Amazon and Apple do), but both Apple and Amazon have their weak points to new regulation.
I could see a law coming to regulate “Big Data” companies in new ways, like the GDPR law in the European Union, but it’s impossible to predict how that would play out. The art of politics is promising to do 110% of something, and declaring victory when you’ve delivered about 4.6% or so, if that. And any new law would be hashed out in the courts, and likely applied in ways its drafters did not intend or failed to foresee, which means it could generate a whole host of new problems on its own. Sadly, very often the default tactic of any government when it decides that Something Needs To Be Done is to engage in a wild overreaction that does not solve the original problem, aggravates the original problem, and also generates a legion of brand-new problems. (I’m sure we can all think of many examples, but please don’t list them in the comments and start a flame war.) It’s also possible that the outcome of the upcoming US presidential election will be so bitterly disputed that whoever does win will inherit a deadlocked national government that doesn’t have the political will to do anything major, or the government will be too preoccupied with the pandemic and its various consequences to address antitrust changes.
To sum up, it’s possible big changes are coming but there are too many variables to predict, and it’s just as possible that not much will happen.
What will happen on the macro scale will happen regardless of individual preferences, so it’s wise to focus on things that you can control. Change in any form, whether good or bad, is the one constant in life, so it’s wise to be prepared for it.
The takeaway for indie authors is that it’s good to remain nimble – indie authors can sell their books on any platform they wish, and while Amazon will likely remain the majority of an indie author’s sales (usually about 60% for me) it’s smart to have as many of your books for sale on as many different sites as possible. A diversified income stream is a happy income stream. 🙂 It’s also a very good idea to control your own website and your own email list, since those are much less likely to be affected by any changes in social media platforms.
And in the end, it is best not to put your trust in princes, but in God.
-JM