Thank You Amazon

For being so big

I love Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). I have felt this way for a long time but ever so much more so since I have become effectively (and I hope temporarily) disabled. I walk on a cane—very slowly. I no longer drive. Shopping is intimidating (though shopping carts are a blessing, better than any cane.) And every day I am grateful that AMZN is so darn big, maybe the closest thing we have ever had to a monopoly in retail.

Traditional antitrust thinking treats size as suspicious. The larger a firm becomes, the more likely it is assumed to be harming consumers. This was rarely true even in bricks and mortar days. Online, it is absurd.

Today’s dominant platforms are not protected from competition; they are the survivors of it. They grew not by charging more or offering less, but by relentlessly improving price, reliability, and convenience until competitors fell away.

And when those competitors fell away, we were better off. Consumers do not want a dozen shopping accounts, passwords, payment relationships, return policies, and customer-service desks. Cognitive simplicity is a real benefit. Trust is a real asset. Convenience compounds.

Amazon did not become dominant by restricting access but by lowering prices, expanding selection, and building the world’s best logistics system. The consumer benefit is not just cheaper goods. It is fewer decisions, fewer failures, and fewer hassles.

Early on AMZN did make a show of restricting access—to other sellers. Then Bezos discovered he was making more money by hosting a gazillion small sellers than by taking ownership of all the junk in his warehouses.

A similar logic applies beyond retail. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) functions less as a monopoly than as a trust-and-identity wrapper. One Apple ID. Biometrics by default. A single payment relationship. Aggressive fraud control. Apple absorbs complexity on the user’s behalf, reducing the cognitive and security burden that otherwise fragments online life.

In old antitrust terms, oligopolies like these are often labeled market failures. No, they are market workarounds for missing infrastructure.

As my partner George Gilder has often pointed out, the Internet is still primitive in crucial ways. Identity remains fragile. Payments are high-stakes and awkward. Trust does not travel well across sites. Each new platform asks users to reassess risk from scratch. Fragmentation raises friction, not competition.

Large platforms thrive because they collapse these failures into a single surface. They amortize fraud risk. They lower the marginal cost of trust. They make routine transactions feel routine. That is real consumer surplus.

Yet distortions remain. Amazon itself is a principal beneficiary of primitive Internet infrastructure, just as the old country store benefitted from long distances and dirt roads.

Because payments are costly and risky, platforms can raise the stakes. Subscriptions—and other excessive bundling--become expensive. One-off purchases are awkward. Micropayments are impractical. Creators and sellers must over charge to support transaction costs. The result is fewer transactions, worse price discovery, and less value for both sides.

Ninety percent of subscribers to this Substack get it free. The principal reason for that is that Substack won’t let me charge less than $50 a year to read my precious thoughts. I am grateful for the few who choose to become paid subscribers despite the ridiculous price. Please don’t tell them that I would never pay it myself.

What I would quite happily do is pay 25 cents or if I were feeling rich, 35 cents, to read one issue of my Substack (or others’). I would eliminate free subscriptions. I’d be willing to bet that a catchy title plus an intriguing preview would lure 25 cents into the hat.

Many of the advantages oligopolies confer today would fade naturally if the underlying infrastructure improved. A more secure internet with blockchain all the way down and strong identity from even better biometrics would facilitate near-frictionless micropayments and make many centralized trust functions ambient.

And I could test ten cents as the price for this Substack—and pray the market does not force me down to a penny.