The alternative to introducing this regulation is not going to a system with no regulation, it's continuing with the current framework where Amazon is actively driving competition out of the market. Opposing this regulation without an actual alternative is just defending the status quo.
> "The solution is to create regulations & laws that prevent this behavior."
I'll take a slightly contrived and simplified set of examples to illustrate why a lot of free-market advocates don't agree with this sentiment as being correct.
1. We identify this "market failing" behavior of Amazon. I.e. Amazon does it a few times and after a while, public starts to
2. Legislators make it illegal for a platform to sell the same products as their suppliers. Easy, right?
3. Amazon alters products to not be technically "the same" so they skirt regulation. E.g. Renames "Plain Artisan Soap" to "Amazon Artisanal Soap", never mind that the product they "copied" was called "Joe's Plain Artisan Soap", and Amazon's product is advertised as "cheap alternative to expensive artisan soaps".
4. We notice and we complain.
6. Amazon complains back (maybe even a few court-cases along the way?), says certain products aren't the same. E.g. Supplier sells artisan soap, but Amazon argue their white-label "soap" isn't the same, it's just soap.
7. So to be fair, legislators start coming up with a reasonable system to identify similar products, which forces amazon to identify "similar" products in order to get them off.
8. Legislators followup and create reasonable rules and exclusions how Amazon can market their branded soap, or how closely the soap can resemble an existing product.
9. Amazon happens to also have a bunch of their own genuine products that it manufactures cheaply. Perhaps a byproduct of some sort of warehouse process they have, and they use their idle machines to make it, or something. But new suppliers come on that happen to sell something that according to regulations is "similar" to those products, and Amazon gets into hot water.
10. Amazon has to put rules, processes, maybe software algorithms to identify such a case. Remember, at Amazon scale, they have thousands of new suppliers and orders of magnitude more "products" that get added each day.
11. Regulators realize it's too difficult to figure this problem out and go to court over it. So they come up with a complaints + arbitration system to address it fairly with a "human in the loop". Think DMCA, takedown requests, etc.
12. Above regulations require paperwork, and you have to register as a platform if you get requests, you're obligated to address complaints of "similar products", etc.
Amazon implements all these rules at each stage, neverminding the "good-faith" interpretation of the original and subsequent laws put in place each time. I.e. "We just don't want platforms abusing their power to undercut genuine businesses." But at this stage we've, through genuine and honest market "interventions" and reasonable rules that seem straightforward and simple and cheap to implement, created regulatory costs that by default get applied to every new "platform" that competes in a space similar to Amazon. You've now successfully put in place regulations that inhibit and prevent competitors manifesting to compete with the existing monopoly or oligopoly.
And the alternative, if I'm getting AbrahamParangi's point, is to create regulations that only apply to Amazon. That seems arbitrary and unpredictable. I understand that regulations applied equally to every company increase barriers to entry, but making special rules for specific companies weirds me out.
