Amazing riveting revelations of Amazon’s endless strategic greed, from destroying Main Street to remaking corporate power in pursuit of total domination, by any means necessary.

Dana Mattioli, Wall Street Journal’s Amazon correspondent, whose reporting highlighted on allegations of Amazon’s anti-competitive behaviour, in her latest book “The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power, reveal how Amazon sells its own branded goods by accessing sensitive commercial data on successful third-party sellers, only then to launch its own Amazon-branded competing goods immediately, despite a senior Amazon executive denying under oath to Congress that it would misuse such data to inform business decisions.

“Everything war” makes a compelling case that no company should be this powerful.

In 2017, Lina Khan, a 27-year-old Yale Law student claimed that Amazon one of America’s most successful tech companies had grown so big and powerful that it was clearly marching towards monopoly. There was a shortage of laws designed to stop anti-competitive behaviour. Large companies are tying up entire industries and then using this control to colonise swaths of economy. Internet revived competition-squashing  behemoths. 

Six years later Khan, a chair of America’s Federal Trade Commission, was able to put her thoughts into action by hitting Amazon’s Bezos with a lawsuit that could end in its break-up. Not everyone agrees with her legal interpretation, and some accuse her of over-reach. Amazon has since changed some of their policies to make its contract less onerous, as it no longer requires. Vendors to post their lowest price on Amazon.

Back in 1911, Standard Oil, John Rockefeller’s great hydrocarbon “octopous” was broken-up signalling the end of America’s “robber baron” age.

Bezos and his company are “driven by a competitive edge  that would stop at nothing if it could own the world, and be in your home, and be everywhere but would”.

In 2022, Amazon surpassed UPS to become America’s biggest non-governmental delivery services swelled by this influx  its take of sellers’ revenue rose from 10 per cent in 2014 to 45 per cent in 2013 according to the Institute for local self-reliance, an anti-monopoly group which adds that prices had to go up  to offset these fees. Amazon’s success is the reward for being efficient and raising consumer welfare.

The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power by Dana Mattiol, Torva £22/ Little, Brown $32.50, 416 pages.