Amazon Is a Monopoly - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/amazon-is-a-monopoly-an-interview-with-sally-hubbard <comment><USER3> I run a consulting company for Amazon suppliers. We have roughly 2-dozen Amazon suppliers and our first-hand experience is that Amazon is absolutely stifling competition/business to the detriment of customer.

The biggest problem is `agreements that restrain trade` is a monopoly practice that happens across the board. They're a black box AND have tiny support systems for their marketplace.

One recent example. A client was on track to be selling $X-million this year of some appliances. Our client was forced to to stop selling because of trump tariffs. Amazon won't accept a "higher price" from our little company that only sells $Xm/year. I guarantee they're talking everyday to the teams at frigidaire/honeywell/GE/etc.

If their systems would transparent this wouldn't be a problem but their algorithms have blackbox variables for the big brands.

<comment><USER4> People have been complaining about basically the same thing with respect to Walmart for decades.

<comment><USER5> Exactly this. I've worked for a company where Walmart was the largest retailer for their product (DVDs). They were constantly being beat up to lower their wholesale prices while also demanding a separate SKU with edited content. Amazon is no different in this case (except not demanding edited content).

Whenever I asked about this, they said you still had to provide product for sale wherever the customers were. The large retailers all want you to believe that you can make up for the lower price in vast quantities their store front provides.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, there's nothing inherently bad about monopolies. The problem only arises when monopolies are forced into people by the government. Instead, people choose Amazon on their own.

<comment><USER7> But Telecoms and the old Robber Barons had monopolies without government forcing people.

I mean there are areas where peoples only choice of ISP is Comcast and equally the Government wasn't forcing people to buy Standard Oil.

Any monopoly is bad because it allows them to ignore consumers as there is no competition.

<comment><USER8> > But Telecoms and the old Robber Barons had monopolies without government > forcing people.

Telecoms were totally built by govs. Back in the days govs were obsessed with controlling the means of communication, so all the related biz was due to the monopoly right.

> AT&T established a network of subsidiaries in the United States and Canada > that held a government-authorized phone service monopoly, formalized with > the Kingsbury Commitment, throughout most of the twentieth century.

> With $18.8 million spent in 2013, Comcast has the seventh largest lobbying > budget of any individual company or organization in the United States.[62] > Comcast employs multiple former U.S. Congressmen as lobbyists.

Sure, nothing to do with the government. Go ahead, try to bypass FCC and establish a new telecom company. It's literally pushed by the gov, as in any heavily regulated domain with patents and other monopoly rights.

As for robber barons, that's mostly an antitrust myth to scare people

> After 1900 it did not try to force competitors out of business by > underpricing them.[37] The federal Commissioner of Corporations studied > Standard's operations from the period of 1904 to 1906[38] and concluded that > "beyond question ... the dominant position of the Standard Oil Co. in the > refining industry was due to unfair practices—to abuse of the control of > pipe-lines, to railroad discriminations, and to unfair methods of > competition in the sale of the refined petroleum products".[39] Due to > competition from other firms, their market share had gradually eroded to 70 > percent by 1906 which was the year when the antitrust case was filed against > Standard, and down to 64 percent by 1911 when Standard was ordered broken > up[40] and at least 147 refining companies were competing with Standard > including Gulf, Texaco, and Shell.

<comment><USER9> But everyone does lobbying. Singling our Comcast like that is weird to prove a point of government and telecoms. Even if they are in the top 10.

<comment><USER8> >But everyone does lobbying.

What? Your local Cafe does lobbying? Only magacorps do that, and yes, they use it to protect themselves from competition.

And no, protecting yourself from competition using lobbying, monopoly rights, patents, regulations means exactly this: big biz uses government to ensure its monopoly/oligopoly, aka governments creating monopolies.

>Comcast like that is weird to prove a point of government and telecoms

Comcast is using government to ensure its marketshare is not an example of government forcing people to use the service?

It exactly is IMHO.

<comment><USER9> It's disingenuous to do faux ignorance by acting like you don't know what I roughly meant when I said everyone. You know I wasn't talking about your local cafe. Or even a $10M/year company.

<comment><USER8> > It's disingenuous to do faux ignorance by acting like you don't know what I > roughly meant when I said everyone. You know I wasn't talking about your > local cafe. Or even a $10M/year company.

Then articulate your point more clearly.

Sure, many the American megacorps are using the government for their own sake. That's exactly proving why US is such a crony state, where big corps are protected from competition by a huge apparatus of bureaucracy.

What's your point? If they use the government it's not the government's fault? Government is literally a mean of establishing oligopolies and shifting the bargaining balance from people to corporations.

<comment><USER10> You point is moot because there is no capitalist society where big companies will not interfere with government. If government is too big, they will lobby the government. If government is too small/inexistent, they will run monopolies by direct financial control and other "standard" practices: buying out competitors, collusion, threats of violence.

<comment><USER8> > buying out competitors, collusion, threats of violence.

You can't buy a competitor if he don't want to be sold. Neither can you threat somebody with violence if the government does its job. I don't even comprehend how the absence of interventionism presume allowance of such violent measures. Don't confuse violence with "non-competitive practices". The latter are seldom harmful, or at the very least much less harmful than those leveraged by the allowance of interventions.

<comment><USER9> I gave the Diapers.com parent company example elsewhere. They were doomed with Amazon's relentless price cutting and marketing. Either they sell or they'll become worthless. You can say they have a choice, but did they really? I don't think they did.

<comment><USER8> > They were doomed with Amazon's relentless price cutting and marketing. > Either they sell or they'll become worthless. You can say they have a > choice, but did they really?

So they've provided a worse service? I'm fine with it, if it means lower prices.

Of course they had a choice. And not only "to sell or become worthless", but also invent or innovate, as Amazon did, when it swallowed a huge chunk of Walmart's pie.

I don't know if Amazon is good or bad, neither myself nor anybody around ever used it, but if its service would not be good enough, any competitor could easily use it to conquer the market (as Amazon itself did), until Amazon would protect itself via regulatory capture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Solid interview. But one thing I saw that was missing was that Amazon also doesn't charge itself the 15% marketplace fee (it varies slightly depending on category but most are 15%) that it charges 3rd party sellers. Since Amazon directly sells tens of millions of items, it had at least a 15% head start on every single one of those products in terms of price competition. Since we're talking retail here, the margins on most items don't exceed 15% in many cases. The fact that they have been allowed to charge 3rd party sellers this fee while not facing it themselves or being forced to stop selling products at all if they are going to run the marketplace is mind-boggling to me.

At the previous company I worked for, they were very careful about this issue. It was a fintech company that had 20+ different lines of business/revenue. Due to the nature of the fintech space, certain business units wanted information/data/services from the other divisions. For example, the index and ETF team wanted corporate actions data from the team that monitored all corporate actions globally and delivered it via a standardized feed. The ETF and index teams were forced to take money from their budget and actually buy the service from the other team to avoid legal issues. They knew that if other ETF and index providers found out _they_ had to pay for the product but our internal team got everything for free and could then undercut them and charge less for the ETF and index products, I guaran-fucking-tee you they would have sued us. Every division in the company was financially separated for _exactly_ this reason. There should be some sort of class-action lawsuit on this basis from all sellers against Amazon, in my opinion. Amazon should be forced to separate that business that actually sells its own products into a new legal entity and have to pay the fees.

<comment><USER12> Amazon doesn't have to pay the 15%, but they DO have to pay for the massive web infrastructure of their retail storefront and for the massive order fulfillment infrastructure.

<comment><USER13> That's what the 15% fee is for. I can envision splitting up amazon into its retail, web, and logistics branches where the retail branch pays the logistics branch the 15% fee to use their network.

<comment><USER14> I don't think it's the government's job the dictate the structure of a company, which, frankly, isn't anywhere near monopoly status in my opinion. I can order most products from countless other stores, which allows me to easily avoid Amazon if I wanted to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How we actually define a company to be a monopoly seems to be somewhat arbitrary? I agree that Amazon engages in anticompetitive behaviour but I'm not sure that it can control prices or exclude competition to that extent? I mean every company can affect that, at what point does it become problematic?

<comment><USER16> > I'm not sure that it can control prices

Amazon very often competes directly with sellers on the Marketplace, and often undercuts them on price.

There are products they sell below the purchase cost, sometimes below manufacturing cost. You can't compete with that unless you have piles of money to burn.

They sell at a loss until they shake everyone loose from a product, then dominate all sales of that products on the Marketplace, raising prices to profitability when they feel like it.

Don't forget they get all product sales information and statistics from every seller on the Marketplace - basically all the market research necessary to pick only "winner" products to sell. Then, when they feel like it, they require sellers to produce original invoices proving purchase of the items. These invoices conveniently contain all necessary information for Amazon to start buying the items directly themselves so that they can sell the item at a loss until you can't compete anymore, leaving Amazon as the sole source for the product.

Wanna be part of Vendor Central - selling directly to Amazon? They dictate the pricing and strong-arm you into selling exclusively to them in many cases. There is no negotiation - there is no adjusting pricing based on quantity ordered. And as much as people might want to think Amazon just buys enough quantity to get what they want - they don't. They just tell you what it will be.

> or exclude competition to that extent?

They can ban you from their Marketplace (the largest consumer Marketplace in the world) at will, with little to zero recourse on your part, via an opaque "Seller Performance" team that only responds to email, sometimes, and provides vague responses to what policies you might have broken.

That is, if you somehow get the eye of the Seller Performance team upon you. The reasons they go after certain sellers and leave others alone are as mysterious as the team behind the decisions.

<comment><USER17> So don't sell on Amazon. There are tons of other options. Amazon is merely the largest, not the only.

<comment><USER16> Is that really still an option the bigger Amazon gets?

At what point is it a defacto monopoly? A huge share of people shop exclusively on Amazon, particularly when compared to 10 years ago. There's no sign it'll stop growing any time soon.

Choosing not to, or being prohibited from selling on Amazon effectively blocks you out of a significant share of ecommerce sales. There's no way around that.

<comment><USER18> > A huge share of people shop exclusively on Amazon

People should ask why. Is it the prices? No. Is it the discoverability? No. It's because when you have a problem with whatever you bought you get reimbursed. No "call Samsung hotline", no "we'll add this totally not free warranty package in your cart".

<comment><USER19> Agreed. The prices are meh. The discoverability is terrible and seemingly getting worse. I even feel like the customer service is also screaming downhill. Still, I'm nearly exclusive with Amazon because I give them money and they send me product, and there's _no_ friction in that exchange.

Consider for comparison my recent experience purchasing a wedding gift from Bed Bath and Beyond. They had done everything right to capture my purchase: They hosted the wedding registry, kept the new couple's address hidden, and by not allowing me to select "I'm buying this somewhere else" made it difficult for me to get the item cheaper from another retailer.

Despite all of that, I still abandoned the cart and came back to Amazon. BB&B requires Verified By Visa, and I require my credit card provider to not be stupid about security, so my card was declined with no recourse.

Mind you, Amazon has declined my payment before, too. But they only did it once, more-than paid for their mistake, and haven't troubled me since.

Amazon is a monopoly like Visa and Mastercard are monopolies. They enrich themselves while facilitating commerce. While I'm uncomfortable with that power they hold, I wouldn't want to be without it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's not a monopoly under the dictionary definition:

>the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.

It is maybe under the Sherman Act:

>"Monopoly power" is generally understood to mean "the power to control prices or exclude competition".

I wish when people use words in a different way to the dictionary meaning they'd say so. Otherwise it leads to a whole lot of pointless "Oh yes it is" vs "oh no it isn't" in discussion.

<comment><USER21> I find that there's a huge amount of discussion that basically amounts to definitional disagreements. I'll cede definitions like "monopoly" for the sake of a discussion and continue to use them otherwise.

The trouble is those are uninteresting questions. "Is Amazon a monopoly?" immediately takes the more interesting discussion "what should we do about the size of Amazon" off the table and leaves us to bicker about what words mean. We likely won't reach an agreement about what officially constitutes a monopoly, but we can reason about what we should do in the future.

<comment><USER22> Most likely nothing will happen with respect to these large companies because generally speaking prosecution only happens when the company's status as a monopoly negatively affects the consumer (allegedly). The criteria is usually price of goods/services. It's possible this might include things like privacy violations or data mishandling in the future, but I doubt it.

There's a DoJ memo, or something similar, that spurred this recent-ish change in policy but i can't seem to find it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well, years ago, when Amazon wasn't a monopoly, who had the choice to make it one?

The final user.

Personally, I've never used Amazon before seeing a friend ordering a fairly huge amount of stuff from there. Prior to that, I was a not-so-obsessed-from- ecommerce eBay user, where I placed an order maybe every 4-5 months. I've started using Amazon because of its returning policy, which is better that eBay's, but by doing so, i've also increased the amount of stuff bought on the platform, because of time. Getting older and having more responsibilities, you've to save some time, then Amazon comes to rescue when it comes to generic stuff.

I guess now it's really late to blame Amazon for the monopoly, as well as Microsoft did in 90s with PCs and Google is doing nowadays with Android+Chrome.

Sure, there are alternatives, but the final decision on who gets the monopoly is the user

<comment><USER24> Aren't they playing really nice and even operating at loss until they become a monopoly? It's not really a choice if a company is giving you free stuff.

Probably it's the same idea with Uber: We can have really nice rides at good prices because rich people are co-paying our rides. When it's only Uber out there, they can start testing our patience while maximising the profits.

Amazon and Uber are not really selling some high margin tech products, their core innovations are not in the product but the business operations and strategies.

<comment><USER25> > Aren't they playing really nice and even operating at loss until they become > a monopoly?

No, they aren't. They publish their financial statement every quarter. Generally their revenue is very close to their expenses. Given that, it's impossible that "operating at loss" is an accurate characterization of their business strategy. Jeff Bezos has a saying; "Your margin is my opportunity." It lays out pretty clearly what Amazon's actual business strategy is, and it lines up well with their financial statements. Target a very small profit margin, move into every possible market by accepting a lower profit margin than incumbents, make money by leveraging scale and network effects to drive down costs in ways that other businesses can't replicate.

<comment><USER24> What I meant was pre-monopoly. The times when a company is constantly loosing money, like Uber.

Anyway, what happens when there are no competitors because the margins are too slim to be profitable without being at Amazon scale? If they are not a charity these margins will get fattier as much as their hearts desires. Their potential competitors won't be able to say "your fat margins are my opportunity" because Amazon will be able to do all kinds of anti-competative things.

Thanks god we have laws that keeps monopolies in check but sometimes these laws can move quite slowly and the damage may not be possbible to repair. Like with the case with Mocrosoft and Google.

<comment><USER25> > Anyway, what happens when there are no competitors because the margins are > too slim to be profitable without being at Amazon scale? If they are not a > charity these margins will get fattier as much as their hearts desires.

If Amazon significantly raises their prices, then suddenly their prices aren't particularly hard to compete against.

> Amazon will be able to do all kinds of anti-competative things

I think we can cross this bridge when Amazon starts doing anti-competitive things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> She forgets that the Amazon marketplace is made up of sellers and the prices aren't controlled by Amazon for a lot of their products. These are inherited from the distributor in most cases. Sure Amazon fulfills the orders but it's not like Walmart that controls the entire process. There is more freedom in Amazon.

Anyways, this is just the hip thing of today. How about making a service better than Amazon? No that's impossible?? Well you can bet there are a million people trying right now so there are and will be plenty more alternatives.

<comment><USER27> > Anyways, this is just the hip thing of today

Observing that Amazon may be monopolizing isn't a new observation.

When they began competing against their vendors is when they crossed the line, in my opinion. The same goes for any marketplace. It is one thing to provide your vendors the tools and information they need to operate better, but then to act on that information yourself - the operator of the marketplace - <USER2> is pretty shady.

<comment><USER28> Yes but EVERY retailer does this. Every single store brand product you see (Costco, Target, Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, etc.) is a result of this. Cheaper products that meet the same demand as brand name vendor goods.

In fact customers are already trained for this. I walk into a store and I immediately price compare against the store brand. So if people doing the same on Amazon, why shouldn't Amazon be allowed to fulfill that? This was a thing in retailers a long time before Amazon started doing it.

If you look around in retail stores today its easy to see how everyone strong arms vendors just the same. For example, ever notice that all of Target's pen section all have a certain color and text printed on the bottom of their packaging indicating the type of pen (Gel, ballpoint, etc)? Target has forced every single vendor (massive companies like Bic, Sharpie, etc.) that sells writing implements in Target to change their packaging, create new SKUs, do different production runs, and handle the logistics of different versions of the same pen. All to be undercut in price by the Target brand pen.

<comment><USER29> > why shouldn't Amazon be allowed

Antitrust law used to address this. Monopolies are not allowed to do things that non-monopolies are allowed to do, because the effects of monopolies doing them are different than the effects of non-monopolies doing it.

Of course, Bork rewrote monopoly policy in a way that opens the door to exactly the sort of monopolies we now have. But it isn't as if this is some new notion invented because people hate Amazon; it used to be the rule.

<comment><USER28> Monopolies weren't allowed to do things that non-monopolies are allowed to do because they would have an outsized ability to harm consumers as a monopoly. But Amazon has repeatedly shown that it isn't harming consumers. In fact, it's pushed other retailers to better the customer experience or go out of business. Should a company be split up just because it's doing its customers good and got too big because... they're doing their customers good and people like that and want to give them their money?

<comment><USER29> That is a reasonable restatement of parts of the Bork doctrine, yes.

Suffice to say this is a recent legal innovation, and many, many people believe ignoring other monopoly effects is myopic.

<comment><USER28> Agreed. It basically comes down to if you agree with his viewpoints on M&A and monopolies. Looks like thats where we differ :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> No it's not, and you still have a burden of a proof on your shoulders. It probably is, indeed, kept up by some degree of anti-competitive practices but it's still not a monopoly but a member of what you call oligopoly, providing a lot of cheap stuff in every of its areas of competition.

I'd like to point out as well that sanctions (not necessarily well-deserved) against Amazon will just destroy some workplaces, mostly lower-qualified ones, which will cause quite a bit of a problem.

<comment><USER31> The interviewee didn't define monopoly by anti-competitive behavior.

> Is Amazon a monopoly?

> Yes, monopoly power is defined as the power to control prices or exclude > competition. Amazon has the power to do both. But being a monopoly on its > own is not illegal under the antitrust laws. Illegal monopolization requires > both 1) monopoly power and 2) that the firm acquired, enhanced, or > maintained that power by using exclusionary conduct.

<comment><USER32> > Amazon has the power to do both.

No they don't.

If Amazon significantly raises prices it charges customers, or lowers prices it pays suppliers, to above/below what Walmart or a hundred others do, are the customers and suppliers going to stay with them? No. When they don't put you in their store, can they also prevent you from reaching the same customers through any other store? No.

The fact that they can choose not to buy from you, or won't pay more than a given price, doesn't make them a monopoly. Anybody can do that. The mom and pop coffee shop on the same corner with six other mom and pop coffee shops, a Dunken Donuts and two Starbucks can do that. But the fact that they won't do business with you doesn't mean you can't sell your goods for a similar price to the same end customers through a hundred competitors, which is why they're not a monopoly.

<comment><USER33> You appear to be only referring to the retail side of Amazon, not the platform side where the article mentions Amazon has numerous restrictive practices in place and set the price through these by excluding competition and competing through their own retail lines, regardless of other (uncompetitive) options

<comment><USER34> Amazon could drive companies within entire product sectors to bankruptcy simply by lowering the price of that product category on Amazon. The problem is that they can afford to do this in a sustainable way because they have so many other product lines.

When other big chains like Walmart do similar things, it does not have the same effect because people don't go to Walmart to buy just one item. Amazon is different; if they lower the price of an item, consumers react quickly and that can put other websites which specialize in that item out of business. Then when all major competitors within the item category are out of business, Amazon can increase the price to any amount it wants and use the extra proceeds to continue the process with different item categories.

<comment><USER32> > Amazon could drive companies within entire product sectors to bankruptcy > simply by lowering the price of that product category on Amazon. The problem > is that they can afford to do this in a sustainable way because they have so > many other product lines.

Selling below cost can be illegal dumping. But do you have any evidence that they're actually doing that, rather than them merely negotiating a better price for it than you and then selling it with thin (rather than negative) margins?

> Then when all major competitors within the item category are out of > business, Amazon can increase the price to any amount it wants

Notice that this only works if nobody is willing to reenter the market when the price increases, which is rarely the case. Otherwise they have to maintain the lower prices forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> _being a monopoly on its own is not illegal under the antitrust laws. Illegal monopolization requires both 1) monopoly power and 2) that the firm acquired, enhanced, or maintained that power by using exclusionary conduct._

 _Exclusionary conduct includes things like predatory pricing, exclusive agreements, refusing to deal with a company, most-favored nation clauses, designing your product or service in a way that excludes competition, and more types of anticompetitive behavior._

How is the above different from "having a moat?" Isn't any company that starts and maintains a curated "ecosystem" engaging in some of these behaviors? Isn't Apple guilty of refusing to deal with certain companies and designing their product or service in a way that excludes competition? For that matter, aren't most of the tech giants?

<comment><USER36> A company that has a monopoly has to follow more rules than other companies because it can do more damage. Certain kind of moat-building is severely restricted for them, such as exclusive contracts or deliberate technology lock-in, while other methods are still legal, such as brand recognition or a rich partner ecosystem or simply a superior product.

>Apple guilty of refusing to deal with certain companies

Apple does not have anywhere near a monopoly in any of the markets they are in [+], hence the anti-trust rules do not apply to them. By contrast these rules do apply to Microsoft and Google, for example.

[+] in the eyes of the law monopoly means control of a market, and market is comprised of interchangeable goods. In this case iPhones and Androids are interchangeable - a consumer is free to buy a Samsung or an Apple phone and neither company is running the risk of excluding the other. Hence the consumer is in no danger of being deprived of choice, and there is no monopoly.

<comment><USER35> _Apple does not have anywhere near a monopoly in any of the markets they are in [+], hence the anti-trust rules do not apply to them._

Having a "moat:" All of the benefits of being a Monopoly, with none of the penalties!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wish this elaborated more on how Amazon is a monopoly. The interviewee defines it as having the power to set prices and exclude competition. I don't see either of those happening. There's a ton of competition, more than enough to severely limit their ability to set prices.

<comment><USER37> You're looking at it as the customer being the people buying things off of amazon. They are in a sense, but not the sense that is important here.

The the sellers on amazon are customers of their marketplace. Much like Colgate and Crest might fight over ideal shelf space in a supermarket (and be changed accordingly by the market), the sellers on amazon must pay the price to be on amazon. Amazon has the power to set prices of appearing in their marketplace, where, and for what keywords. Amazon is also now selling their own merchandise on those same (digital) shelves. There are few alternatives to amazon for online retailers. So, to reach customers, many retailers must use amazon, despite the rent-collection they do. The next marketplace for online retail is walmart.com, which, and lets be honest, when was the last time any of us went to walmart.com...

<comment><USER17> There are plenty of alternatives to Amazon for sellers too. None of them are as big, but they are there.

If Amazon has the power to set prices, why are their prices the same as everyone else's?

<comment><USER37> We don't see the price to use amazon to sell things. We only see the retail price. A marketplace can be using monopolistic-pricing to capture returns from the retailer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> No it is not. Unless you can't buy basically the same stuff from lots of other places this is simple the usual whining about 'big cooperations'.

The reality is that amazon overs good prices and people like to shop there.

And yes, suppliers are gone complain, that amazon is evil, just like suppliers complain that walmarket is evil, just as suppliers always claim whatever larger reseller they sell to is a evil monopoly.

The definition of a monopoly in economics is if that seller can essentially employ monopoly pricing, but amazon prices are not incredible higher compared to the competition.

<comment><USER39> What you're referring to is a 'pure' monopoly, which are relatively rare (but still common enough).

The wider use of definition in economics is a company that dominates a market to the extent that is has control over the market. For example, when suppliers have little actual choice in dealing with the company.

Higher prices are not necessarily a product of a monopoly and are not needed to define one.

<comment><USER38> Its actually now standard in anti-trust law now that you actually have to show significant consumer harm. Richard Posner writting has this made the standard in Anti-Trust.

In the past it was just politics and any big company could get hit with anti- trust. Presidents routinly used anti-trust to go after their political enemies.

And if you don't use this 'pure' definition you are essentially just saying 'this is a big company'. Every single large company would be a 'monopoly' by those definition.

<comment><USER39> The comment I was replying to was referring to the word's definition in economics, not the current legal standards of specific countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> As governments seem slow to action, would coordinating consumers shopping help combat the monopoly power of some industry? For example, having an app that notifies you to try and buy from a competitor like walmart for a few days to pressure amazon into bargaining?

<comment><USER28> And why would consumers coordinate against a company that is benefiting them with lower prices, great customer service, and insanely fast shipping now (I live in a small town of 40,000 - 3 hours from any major metropolis and get 1 day shipping)? Honestly I'm pretty impressed how such a massive company still seems to do a majority of their customers good, without even making them pay more. I'd say most of the people I know who use amazon are pretty happy with the service they are getting. To the average consumer whose looking out for their own personal bottom line, whats the benefit of coordinating against them?

<comment><USER40> There wouldn't be! However, if your assumptions that consumers are all happy with amazon are incorrect and there are things they would like changed at amazon then there would be an advantage to collective bargaining to combat amazon's monopoly power.

Also, such collective bargaining could be used to bargain with companies other than amazon.

<comment><USER28> Fair point. I'm not saying that all consumers are happy. But for collective bargaining to work you pretty much have to be the majority or its hard to do much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I have actually started adopting other online vendors because Amazon's quality control and customer support is so atrocious. I think Amazon will end up digging its own grave by building this huge adoption for online buyong, training competition how to do online retail right, and then die from a million cuts as thousands of specialty vendors step in. Their search sucks too...you just get fed paid advertisements for crap. AWS is amazing but I no longer trust Amazon as a place to buy physical items.

<comment><USER42> Amazon's customer support "atrocious"? Literally only heard of great experiences with their customer support from people I've talked to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Richard Stallman has some thoughts on this topic:

[https://stallman.org/amazon.html](https://stallman.org/amazon.html)

<comment><USER44> Stallman's biggest problem, in my opinion, is that all his proposed solutions are individual consumption choices. A beast like Amazon can only be tamed by collective action and regulation.

<comment><USER43> From his post:

> We should not allow a company to have a share over around 10% of any market. > If in a certain field a single dominant company is beneficial for society, > that means it is a natural monopoly, and should be served by a regulated > utility.

<comment><USER44> Fair enough. I had just read the introduction, and the section headlines. I'm glad to see him agree on the importance of regulated utilities. Free Software sometimes gets associated with the American Capitalist Libertarian movement. So I wasn't clear on Stallman's personal views on the matter.

<comment><USER45> _> Free Software sometimes gets associated with the American Capitalist Libertarian movement. So I wasn't clear on Stallman's personal views on the matter._

The problem isn't that you weren't clear on his personal views on the matter, but that you comment on "all his proposed solutions" when even a cursory reading of his political articles would reveal that he is very much not a libertarian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> According to Ben Thompson, "There really is no plausible argument that Amazon has a monopoly."

[https://stratechery.com/2019/tech-and- antitrust/](https://stratechery.com/2019/tech-and-antitrust/)

</comment><comment><USER47> This is an attempt to divert attention from real monopolies like Comcast and healthcare monsters. What we really need in the tech space is UK-style laws to enforce competition between ISPs, GDPR-style laws to protect personal data and CA-style prohibition on NDAs. But politicans won't get paid for any of this. Instead they go for easy and profitable targets, such as pretending to care that Amazon is a monopoly.

<comment><USER48> Stronger anti-trust protections and enforcement will be a benefit all 'round.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm following Amazon for a long time They are a monopoly indeed

But they became one only because they are great at doing business

They built an empire from an online book store....

<comment><USER50> Exactly.

I recently bought a razer blade stealth through amazon, but the speakers were messed up and there was coil whine. I installed the recommended firmware upgrade but that caused Linux to crash with non-standard ACPI behavior. I decided to go through razer support because I know it's better for them.

After over a week and maybe ten hours of emailing back and forth with support, I was asked to reinstall windows and see if that worked... Instead, I just clicked a few buttons on amazon and dropped the laptop off at the local UPS store and was done in ~20min.

There's a reason Amazon is in its current position. If I had bought from the razer store directly, I would've had an even worse time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Unless Walmart Canada,No Frills,Sobeys or any other retailer compete with Amazon,we will still read these news.Amazon prime is great if you don't find enough time to go shopping for minor things.Amazon is great for non-perishable item shopping if you compare its prices with other retailers.

Why would I pay $4.99,at Sobeys, for a jar of nescafe if I can get it from Amazon for $3.97?

</comment><comment><USER52> I think I can generalize that the problem with Amazon is similar to many of the modern tech companies in that they're super well funded and aren't expected to make a profit which allows them to undercut incumbents.

Amazon can price lower than Target/Wallmart/B&N/Local Stores, lose money every year while the competition slowly dies.

Uber can price lower than local taxis, lose money every year while the competition slowly dies.

Tesla can price lower than Ford/Toyota/Merc, lose money every year while the competition slowly dies.

AirBnB can price lower than Hilton/Marriot/Locals, lose money every year while the competition slowly dies.

WeWork can price lower than office buildings, lose money every year while the competition slowly dies.

The problem is low interest rates and another tech bubble.

<comment><USER53> I'm not a huge Uber fan, but in their case at least I don't think you're being entirely fair. My home airport is SFO. The official taxis there have an extremely annoying pricing policy: if your destination is more than 20 miles form the airport they add a $50 surcharge to the cost of your trip. (I live 25 miles away.) And you can't summon a cab with an app. If you're at the airport they are very convenient. If you are anywhere else taxies are hopeless. In the face of such abject stupidity on the part of the taxis, I use Uber (well, Lyft) despite my sympathies for professional drivers. If the taxi companies weren't behaving like such utter and complete morons for _years_ it would be easier to sympathize with them.

<comment> tj-teej Serious question: once the taxi industry has died what makes you believe that Uber won't implement similar policies?

<comment><USER54> Nothing. As the saying goes, "get while the getting is good".

If I don't take the cheap fare today, it doesn't buy me anything in the long run anyway. Present dollars saved are a certainty, and if history repeats, there is a reasonable likelihood of future disruption being my easy-our for an anticompetitive Uber.

<comment><USER55> I don't know if it's a good strategy to wait as long as it took Uber to supplant taxis for something to supplant Uber. If it follows that pattern, you won't live to see it, so "easy-out" is probably not the greatest descriptor.

That being said, your individual boycott will have a minuscule effect, and money in your pocket is good. I just can't imagine that capitalism is meant to work like this; paying people to use your product until all the competition is gone, then once you're a monopoly jacking prices up to infinity, ditching quality, and regulating or buying out any potential upstarts.

<comment><USER54> A cynical person might say that it is meant to work _exactly_ like this. Killing off older companies seems likely to be a service to progress and the economy. (not to the employees, which is a reason why I'm not a genuine advocate of pure capitalism). nevertheless, There are organizational, bureaucratic, and process debts in addition to technical debt, and I think capitalism acknowledges that in the end, those debts never get paid. Borrow against the future and burn out bright and fast. The good news, is except for capital itself, borrowing technology/process/and bureaucracy against the future is borrowing from yourself, not creditors.

<comment><USER56> Every dollar of funding that Uber receives comes from an investor that believes there is a long term business model in Uber. Even the short horizon investors have to believe that, otherwise they would have nobody to sell their shares to in the short term.

In terms of killing competition, price wars almost always benefit consumers. Prices go down during a price war, and if the industry is susceptible to them, then another one will occur after the war is over. Look at the airline industry, it's full of price war cycles. A carrier will try compete on a route, drive prices down, and sometimes this will result in carriers leaving the competition, and prices going back up again afterwards. When that happens, some time will pass, and it will happen again.

The worst outcome for consumers is that the market returns to a non- competitive state when the dust settles. In that case, consumers are just back where they started, after having temporarily enjoyed the benefits of the price war. If the market ends up in an unreasonably non-competitive state after the price war, then the victor has just set themselves up for anti-trust action.

Every mainstream capitalist economist I've ever heard of has firmly believed that regulating competition is an essential part of a capitalist economy. So if you think that's not happening, it would seem to be a failure of government more that a failure of capitalist economics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Expropriate them.

</comment><comment><USER58> And what about Alphabet?

<comment><USER59> All of these companies (Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Facebook, etc) are very fortunate that the others exist because _every single goddamn time_ anybody criticizes one, somebody will try to derail the discussion with _" well what about [one of the others]?"_

They all suck. Stop trying to use one to justify another.

<comment><USER60> >somebody will try to derail the discussion

Pointing out competitors to a supposed monopoly is not derailing the conversation. It _is_ the conversation.

<comment><USER61> Amazon is probably not a monopoly in the advertising market, but Alphabet doesn't run an online store.

<comment><USER60> [https://shopping.google.com](https://shopping.google.com)

<comment><USER62> I'm also having a garage sale this weekend but that's not really competition to Amazon

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> For clarification: Monopolies can result from anti-competitive practices, or an overwhelming competitive advantage. Talking about the latter here

The 'anti-trust' and 'monopoly' arguments strike me as hypocritical and self- contradictory in the context of capitalism. We encourage businesses to compete and succeed, yet when they do so disproportionally, everyone suddenly feels entitled to intervene in their structure, policies & processes - and best of all, we have no objective guidelines or criteria for when this should happen.

The question then becomes: who gets to decide when to bring forth these concerns, and what's their agenda? Food for thought.

<comment><USER64> I remember reading about an anti-trust case against Microsoft in the 90s since they included Microsoft Explorer with the OS. They were forced to separate the two, but Chromebook does the same thing without consequences. The rules for Antitrust keep changing and companies are integrating vertically and horizontally quickly before the law catches up.

<comment><USER65> _> Chromebook does the same thing without consequences_

It's not the same at all. Microsoft were forced to unbundle IE from Windows because they were using their market dominance in one area (operating systems) to give themselves an artificial advantage in another area (web browsers). This bundling shielded IE from competition and squeezed other players out of the web browser market. Apple are within their rights to bundle Safari with MacOS, because MacOS only has a minority market share; same goes for ChromeOS. You can't be sanctioned for exploiting a dominant market position if you don't _have_ a dominant market position.

[https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/273591/eu_microsoft...](https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/273591/eu_microsoft_shields_ie_from_competition/)

<comment><USER64> Ok so dominating the market is an important factor for anti-trust litigation. Google is dominating the search market and used this to push Chrome (searching from the url address bar was one of the main reasons people switched). Is that not the same as what Microsoft did? Now they dominate both markets and leveraged both to grow the other.

<comment><USER65> Google were sanctioned in 2017 for exploiting their dominance in the search market to promote their other services.

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15872354/google-eu- fine-a...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15872354/google-eu-fine- antitrust-shopping)

<comment><USER64> This is the EU. What has the US done to limit or sanction Google? Why was Microsoft pursued and Google not? Both were using one market dominance to push another.

<comment><USER66> Google wasn't a dominant search engine at the time of the Microsoft litigation, and different people were in charge of the Justice Department by the time that it became one. Not every potential crime is or can be prosecuted – especially when there is a lot of room for legal debate as to whether the conduct was criminal, and the defendant is well-resourced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> If eBay, UPS, Walmart, Rackspace, Oracle and Dropbox (post Hellosign acquisition) merged -- you would have a near approximation of the market impact of Amazon. If it's not a monopoly then it's something worse.

<comment><USER68> How do you figure? Amazon makes less than half the revenue of Walmart. Personally it seems kind of silly to talk about any of them as a 'monopoly' when I literally use a competitor to each of the biggies (Amazon, Apple, Google, etc.) every week. Why does anyone consider these companies a 'monopoly' when I'm easily and conveniently getting the same product from someone else?

<comment><USER69> They're each (arguably) a monopoly in their own principal market(s) which (mostly) aren't the same.

You're not buying toilet paper from Apple.

You're not searching the internet with Amazon.

For the discussion to make sense, you have to specify which market you're looking at -- a company can have a monopoly in one market (e.g. search) but not in another (e.g. mobile phones).

<comment><USER70> I'm not buying toilet paper from Amazon or searching the internet with Apple!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> > Amazon gives its own private label products and first-party products an > advantage over competitors in a number of ways, from algorithmic ranking, to > the buy box, to premium advertising, to direct to consumer marketing, to > exclusive customer reviews.

Alphabet does absolutely the same but have more power in advertising & page ranking plus collects petabytes users data using Chrome browser and Android platform.

Walmart, Google Clouds, Azure are alive and still grows up, so this article use over-dramatic effects like TV show.

<comment><USER72> Let me restate the article's argument:

Amazon has enough monopoly power in certain categories to abuse that power to harm competition, and Amazon chooses to do so.

Would you still disagree?

<comment><USER35> _______ has enough monopoly power in certain categories to abuse that power to harm competition, and ______ chooses to do so._

This generalizes nicely!

What if a company has enough power in certain categories to abuse that power to harm competition, not directly for itself, but for its clients and advertisers? I'm thinking about YouTube here. YouTube has enough power in certain categories to abuse that power to harm media enterprises on the YouTube platform. Some people argue that YouTube does so to the benefit of other media enterprises who happen to pay YouTube for advertisement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Couldn't read this because of the huge, glaring falsehood on the first page. Monopoly does NOT mean "power to affect prices". It is defined as having _exclusive_ control of the supply of a good within a market. Redefining monopoly to fit your argument is just lazy clickbaiting.</comment>


A Letter to /r/python - <AUTHOR> http://journal.kennethreitz.org/entry/r-python <comment><USER2> Somehow pipenv got endorsed as an official tool by PyPA far before it was ready for production. The documentation for pipenv and Python packaging didn't make it clear early on pipenv was for applications, not libraries.

Also the pipenv maintainers were very rude about closing bugs. This has lead to a lot of reasonable criticism about the tool and how it's maintained.

Despite marketing the tool heavily, Reitz is taking all of this personally and is blaming others or his mental issues.

Now, Reitz has posted this 3 times on /r/python in the past 2 days, and hosted a hangout while also saying he doesn't have time for criticism.

And he and his PyPA buddies are all posting in all the threads and making passive-aggressive tweets.

To top all this off Reitz has now made and mods /r/positivepython in an attempt to imply the original is somehow not "positive". And in my opinion to exert more power over the python community.

Before all this I really respected him, but this childish out burst will really make me think about how well design or endorsed his work is in the future.

<comment><USER3> You write "The documentation for pipenv and Python packaging didn't make it clear early on pipenv was for applications, not libraries."

The linked-to essay says: "There is a misnomer that Pipenv is not useful for libraries. That is false. Try using $ pipenv install -e . and see what it does when you lock. It augments setup.py. I, as a library developer, find that extremely useful."

I can't help but conclude that the documentation doesn't make that clear because the author doesn't think it's true.

<comment><USER4> Reitz is talking about development; everyone else is talking about packaging and distribution.

<comment><USER3> I confess that I don't understand the issues. Then again, I only last month migrated my tools from 'distutils' to 'setuptools', so I know I'm way behind the times.

I have just now read [https://docs.pipenv.org/advanced/#pipfile-vs- setuppy](https://docs.pipenv.org/advanced/#pipfile-vs-setuppy) on the topic and am still confused by the terminology. Eg, "Applications are different in that they usually are not depended on by other projects."

I am used to writing command-line applications which are used as dependencies for other projects.

But that is neither here nor there - no need to answer. Thanks for pointing out the nuance I did not recognize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did a quick browse through the threads in question and suggest others do the same. Yes, there is negativity, but the actual debate is more complex than simply one grumpy side slamming a poor developer.

The most relevant comment I found was by /u/bixmix:

> It's getting much worse - not better. The internal churn within pip also is > not community driven as much as it is developer driven. It's like we didn't > learn from the debacle of python3 vs 2.

I'm not a Pythonist so I had no idea there was such a huge debate over how to manage deps. At various points the past few years I've googled "bundler for python" and come up with different projects. I remember trying pipenv early on (didn't work with conda Python install). Then I revisited it months later--the project was much more developed--and it worked great. FWIW I like pipenv, it solves my largest gripe with Python development.

If you have as part of your community philosophy "there should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it," it seems like you're going get a lot of stubborn tug-of-war situations (see 2 vs 3) where each side thinks their way is the superior way and there is less room to compromise for the sake of keeping the community together. That said, this pattern of debate is pretty universal across communities.

Ruby--even with it's MINASWAN motto--had it's own RVM vs rebenv drama back in 2011. Same sort of developer/community vs developer/community drama. Nowadays I think rbenv has a larger following.

[http://www.rubyinside.com/rbenv-a-simple-new-ruby-version- ma...](http://www.rubyinside.com/rbenv-a-simple-new-ruby-version-management- tool-5302.html)

To contrast this drama, look at what the NPM team had to say about Facebook's yarn: [https://blog.npmjs.org/post/151660845210/hello- yarn](https://blog.npmjs.org/post/151660845210/hello-yarn)

<comment><USER6> As a fellow rubyist in python land, I'm also a fan of Pipenv because it uses a model I understand very well - that of Bundler (and similar to that of Cargo and Yarn). I do have some technical issues with it, like the strange hiding of the virtualenv in a random-like location instead of .venv by default, but overall it's a large improvement over requirements.txt/setup.py/frozen_requirements.txt and even the new toml thing.

Maybe there is some inside baseball going on here when it comes to python foundation etc, but as an outsider looking in the vitriol seems totally unnecessary. I wouldn't develop Python software w/o Pipenv.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't use python so I'm not involved in the controversy either way, but it's pretty encouraging to me that this person is open about the limitations of his humanity and its effects on his (apparently very popular) project. He acknowledges it and has taken steps to limit its impact on the project.

We'll probably never know many projects have withered on the vine because of similar issues. Kudos to him for his open letter and willingness to deal with the negativity in a meaningful way. (It always kills me when people attack others for providing _free fucking software._ )

</comment><comment><USER8> People are rightly turned off that the Python Software Foundation (which Kenneth is a core member of) declared PipEnv the official package manager[0]. It reeks of favoritism, insider politics and the cult of personality surrounding the tool's author. It would have been better if PipEnv proved itself as a better tool in the open marketplace of ideas.

[0] - [https://packaging.python.org/tutorials/managing- dependencies...](https://packaging.python.org/tutorials/managing- dependencies/)

<comment><USER9> Python the community is full of dogma. That is why I don't like the language and I stay away from the community. Their own ideas come before objective truth to them.

<comment><USER10> You don't like the language because of dogma you perceive to be in the community?

<comment><USER9> Not only, of course. BTW I have consciously avoided saying I disliked it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My two cents is that conda and conda-forge is the "right" way forward, and attention focused on pipenv is not suboptimal because of pipenv (though you can make engineering arguments against it— after all, it is still _very_ young and has not yet matured the way other packaging tools have).

Rather it's bad because it's yet another set of spec files and environment tools to learn, potentially further fracturing the community and taking attention away from other approaches.

To be fair, it's not really a problem with pipenv, but rather with any "official" community endorsement of pipenv. Saying it's a third party, optional tool and you're free to have at it if it's good for your project is fine. But the minute there's any degree of officialness to it, it just creates yet another fissure in the anarchy of Python packaging.

My reaction is more malaise. Guess I'll have to learn about this new packaging gadget too, to be current and signal how with-it I am. But in any case I have a choice, I'll still just use conda and Docker for application & environment management, supplemented by pip and virtualenv when appropriate.

<comment><USER12> Current conda dev lead here. Just want to reference an issue we'll be tackling ideally on the timeline of the next 12 months. [https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/7248](https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/7248) Conda is not without its problems in the workflow that pipenv addresses. We know we have a deficiency here, and addressing that deficiency is one of our enumerated highest priorities.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for your work! I agree these are valuable design features to add and to get right, and also agree that pipenv offers tools for this workflow.

From my perspective, I've tended to prefer Docker for this. This allows me to version control environment components like environment variables in the form of the Dockerfile. I usually have a Makefile for my project which then uses multistage builds or other techniques to automatically detect when environment.yml (or package changes, like to setup.py) take place, requiring a rebuild of the container, so that downstream things like running tests, dropping into an interactive debugger in a full environment (with the right python environment, environment variables, etc.), all just become simple Make directives.

It doesn't cover everything. Notably, for situations when there are many target environments, like testing a library I intend to distribute cross- platform, across Python 2/3, etc., I might still use a tool like appveyor rather than suffering the multiplicity of a bunch of Dockerfiles and Make commands to target multiple environments.

But for most applications I develop with an intention of targeting a small set of production or dev environments, it turns out to be better IMO to separate the Python environment & package definition entirely from the larger runtime environment (ENV vars, etc.), and use Docker for that part, with Make as the bridge.

Combined with making a library choose sensible defaults for ENV vars, copiously documenting them, and providing examples, this has worked well enough that I do not need or want to mix the external environment configuration with the app's config files or package spec, in a "separation of concerns" sense.

Your mileage may vary, but this pattern has really worked well for me, and makes me skeptical of solutions that approach combining environment configuration with packaging as a first-class feature, rather than as a special case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I saw the first of the posts he mentions, and yes, I was very surprised to see the negativity. There is literally no reason to be negative, if you don't like the tool, use another. People seem to be upset that Pipenv is the recommendation now, but it's better than pip, and it _should_ be the recommendation until something better comes along.

I'm more upset about the whole pyproject.toml thing that means I have to migrate everything _again_ , from Pipfile this time, even though I have barely finished migrating _to_ it!

<comment><USER14> pyproject.toml isn't another way to specify dependencies for Python code.

The long version of why it exists:

Historically, a Python package has been defined by the existence of the setup.py file. Executing this file with various command-line arguments is how packaging tasks are carried out: 'setup.py install' installs the package, 'setup.py sdist' builds a source distribution (.tar.gz) suitable for uploading to a package repository, etc., etc.

But this workflow has dependencies! Most packages will only depend on setuptools (which supplies the setup() function) and wheel (which supports building binary packages), so the packaging tooling assumes the presence of setuptools and wheel and you never have to specify them as explicit dependencies (in the old _old_ days, setuptools used a drive-by installer file bundled into the package so people who didn't have setuptools could still install setuptools-based packages; nowadays, pip supplies it automatically).

But what if you have a workflow that requires something else? What if you use an alternative package manager, or package build tool, or really _anything_ that isn't setuptools or wheel? How do you specify the toolchain you need to work with your package?

That is the thing pyproject.toml solves. Since it's not an executable Python file, it can't get stuck in a chicken-and-egg problem ("execute setup.py to find out what you need to execute setup.py"), and it can specify the necessary build system for a package in a standardized way.

<comment><USER13> Yes, I understand the purpose, but the result is that it replaces any previous way of specifying dependencies. It's great that it exists, but it's frustrating that it was developed right when the new thing for specifying dependencies (Pipfile) was starting to become popular.

<comment><USER14> If you think it's another "thing for specifying dependencies" in the category of the pipenv Pipfile, you have not understood the purpose of pyproject.toml.

<comment><USER13> If you think that's what I think, you haven't understood my comment. Again, I'm saying that I don't want to migrate to yet another format so soon, even if it does much more than just specify dependencies.

<comment><USER14> Suppose you are developing something which needs to make HTTP requests. So you have a dependency on the requests library.

 _pyproject.toml is not the place where you declare that dependency_. This is why I am pushing back on you, because your comments all very very very strongly imply that you think pyproject.toml is a place where you would declare that dependency.

pyproject.toml is where you'd declare that you're using an alternate build/packaging toolchain. You would then use whatever mechanism that toolchain provides for specifying your dependencies (in the case of the default setuptools build/packaging toolchain: install_requires in setup.py).

<comment><USER13> Okay, I see what you mean now. I was confused because Poetry declares dependencies in the pyproject.toml, but looking at the actual file, it does it in a Poetry-specific section, so it's not compatible with any of the other tools:

[https://github.com/sdispater/poetry/blob/master/pyproject.to...](https://github.com/sdispater/poetry/blob/master/pyproject.toml)

<comment><USER14> Alternative packaging toolchains _can_ use pyproject.toml that way; it's an extensible file.

But you've caught on to the key thing, which is that neither they, nor the default setuptools-based toolchain, _have_ to do that. The pyproject.toml file exists to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of specifying that you use an alternative toolchain, when figuring that out might otherwise be dependent on your preferred toolchain already being present and configured.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Gah, why would anyone release software into the public domain if this is the type of thanks they get.

I mean, I have no idea if he's right, wrong, or sideways here, but what is clear is that he's released open source software and people are hating on him for it. It's free! You don't have to use it, do you? What gives anyone the right to throw hate towards an open source author?

<comment><USER16> Whenever you feel that way, tell yourself that 5% of humanity is fundamentally somewhere between horrible and really horrible, capable of doing bad things to their fellow humans without a moment's remorse. Do that while not forgetting that the other 95% isn't like that. You're mostly (not exclusively) going to hear from that 5% when it comes to criticism or hostile feedback, they're loud and they're mean, they often lust to harm others (the outward projection of their own internal issues). You'll far more rarely hear from the kinder 95%; I'd suspect that effect is in play here, as it so often is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is Kenneth's presentation about Pipenv at PyCon last week which is well worth watching:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBQAKldqgZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBQAKldqgZs)

</comment><comment><USER18> My wife is bipolar type 2 and many people on my father's side of my family are bipolar tyle 1 so I partially understand your struggles. Few people truely understand what bipolarity does to a person and their family and I just wanted you to know as someone who does:

Keep doing what you have got to do to make it through the day!

</comment><comment><USER19> Python as a language is incredibly productive as someone who has used it for almost 20 years. The secret to being happy and productive using the language is to completely ignore the noise though: PyCon, blogs, reddit, "blessed frameworks", BDFL, etc.

This will make you as happy as reading the New York times every 30 minutes to find out what Trump is up to, or being on Facebook or Instagram and making yourself envious of other people's lives.

Literally NOTHING matters in Python other than things on a yearly cycle. Don't worry be happy, and just unsubscribe to all things Python that happen at the Micro level and your appreciation of the language will increase.

<comment><USER20> This has been my path. I love Python, but I ignore all this other stuff. I have better things to worry about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I guess I'll never know what drives people to talk about the creators and maintainers of the tools they use in such a negative way. Especially given how little they actually know about them! It also strikes me that the moderators of r/python could be doing more to curb the personal attacks.

</comment><comment><USER22> WRT to not being able to use pipenv for multiple python versions in a project - i.e. a library, it's been a couple of years since I've writing some substantial python libraries, but do people not use tox anymore? Why can't people stick to the usual virtualenv + pip + tox routine?

</comment><comment><USER23> Its silly where he defends the cult of personality and explains it with his marketing. Like there can be a good cult of personality.

</comment><comment><USER24> it's a good solution if for your understanding

</comment><comment><USER25> There is such an air of entitlement with open source these days.

I guess more and more developers don't remember when all the coolest shit WASN'T free. You had to pay for compilers, editors, manuals, etc.

If someone writes a piece of software that you invest into your pipeline, understand that without some sort of contractual agreement, that person isn't OBLIGATED to maintain that code, much less give a shit about your feedback.

Is Ken smug?

Yes.

Is this post full of insufferable little whiny points?

Yes.

But is Ken going to have to do what the python community wants wrt pipenv?

Hell no.

Granted, a lot of this conflict could've been done differently and with better tact, but the gritty fact of the situation is that no matter what happens, it's not his fault for giving away the work. Even if the whole world depended on a module, it's still a voluntary action.

<comment><USER9> I am not familiar with this particular situation, but while baseless entitlement is bad, criticism is good, and when you publish something with the intention that others use it---and reading his post it seems to me that what he does it not open sourcing a tool he made for himself, he wants people to use pipenv---you are no more the sole owner of it. More so if other people put effort (i.e. patches and bug reports and proposals) in to it. The OP says:

> My response to this comment is — first off, my fame, while certainly > categorized under "cult of personality" is not necessarily accidental. It's > called marketing. I worked very hard at becoming well known within the > Python community, and toiled away at it for years.

after quoting

>> If only these people didn't advertise themselves as the next best thing to sliced bread, collecting undeserved fame, jobs, influence, and as consequence harming very large number of people and technology in general, I wouldn't mind them doing whatever projects they like.

(w/o attribution, unfortunately), which shows that, if pipenv is a sub-par but popular solution (I did not ever use it), this latter quote may be a completely valid criticism.

I am diverting from my point: if Ken _wants_ and _encourages_ the python community to use pipenv, then he might have to obey that community, and he better does. But if he's releasing pipenv just to give back to the community and share his solution to his problems with others, then you're right. After all, if the participants have no regards for each other, that's a bunch of selfish people, not a community.

<comment><USER26> I don't think there's any such thing as a 'python community' and the vast majority of people that use python don't know about any of this political bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here's a radical idea, and please read it slowly:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

whatever dialog you're trying to start around

a blog post where you're talking to /r/python,

by sharing it here on ycombinator News,

is BETTER DONE by a text post on /r/python.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

In fact someone (you? don't care) already shared your blog to r/python instead of posting your entry as a text post. so why are you sharing it here? r/Python is already having dialog on r/Python based on the blog post where a guy talks to r/Python.

this is really bad Rediquette, dude. not upvoting your transparent attempt at generating SEO points

<comment><USER28> I don't know if pknerd is the author. EDIT: In fact he isn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> tl;dr: Ken is upset and amazed that disrupting the workflows and toolchains of entrenched Python developers is causing a backlash, and that negative things are being said about him.

The post is self-aggrandising and he has the audacity to think he knows what is best for everybody. There is also the real chance this tool will replace other tried and true tools and workflows with a more complicated one. It smacks of systemd vs upstart vs sysv

<comment><USER30> But... You don't have to use it? How does pipenv disrupt anyone's workflow? It's optional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > I'm Kenneth — a nice guy who builds nice tools and takes a lot of pictures.

 _Written with literally no knowledge of this before:_

This killed it for me.

</comment><comment><USER32> This guy is so full of himself.

<comment><USER33> TL;DR I'm famous and contributed to the Python community, I'm depressed (it's real! Check this references) because people don't like me forcing them to use my tool. these people must be awful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Just FYI, I posted this y'day, tho didn't invoke much of a discussion - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17105738](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17105738)

</comment><comment><USER35> kind of thought it was going to be a letter like 'why the hell you guys still using python' a letdown indeed

</comment><comment><USER36> 'I consider myself to have been mildly underpaid, considering what I was responsible for — the entire deployment experience (including uptime) of Python apps on Heroku, one of the largest deployment platforms in the world.'

So, you're saying you don't have enough career experience that this is surprising to you?

Megacorps are outsourcing their core processing systems to 3rd level subcontractors, and these are the systems that literally run the economy itself, and have been doing so for nearly 2 decades now if not longer.

Is this a just or fair situation? no (in my view) But hardly new or surprising.. and certainly not relevant to the point you're trying to make.</comment>


It's amazing that you can recognize all of these characters just by their colors - <AUTHOR> https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/527676_10150740378456413_711476412_11895462_1581534758_n.jpg

<comment><USER2> I think I got all but one:

Simpsons, Teenage Mutant Teenage Turtles South Park, The Smurfs, Asterix and Obelisk, Burt and Ernie, Donald Duck & his three nephews, ???

Who is in the bottom right?

<comment><USER3> Lucky Luke :)

<comment><USER2> Ah, thanks! Lucky Luke and the Daltons. Haven't read that series.</comment></comment></comment>