It would be enormously, impossibly wasteful for anything to come around and replace Amazon. It'd be like replacing Google. You're basically talking market chaos and massive supply chain disruption, probably to the point of extensive loss of life: you'd be surprised how much depends on these giant, government-like systems.
Personally, I think the poster suggesting that Amazon may start lobbying for basically welfare, is onto something. What if they lobbied for a massive redistribution scheme where half the excess/arbitrageous profits made by the 0.001% are redistributed to the 99.999% in the form of Amazon store credit and only Amazon store credit?
Since that is either already, or will inevitably be, the single most efficient distribution network by which you could get goods and resources to the populace in a market system?
> It'd be like replacing Google. You're basically talking market chaos and massive supply chain disruption, probably to the point of extensive loss of life
What? Granted an overnight transition could cause disruption, but in a few months, what couldn't be replaced?
Gmail? GMaps? Android? Youtube? Search+Adwords+GAnalytics? GCE? their CDN could be the worst, maybe? they all already have big competitors, and since Google's quality is minimal, it wouldn't be that hard to switch over. But you need a motivated company, i.e. just a little more effort than OpenStreetMaps or FastMail.
Personally, I think the poster suggesting that Amazon may start lobbying for basically welfare, is onto something. What if they lobbied for a massive redistribution scheme where half the excess/arbitrageous profits made by the 0.001% are redistributed to the 99.999% in the form of Amazon store credit and only Amazon store credit?
Since that is either already, or will inevitably be, the single most efficient distribution network by which you could get goods and resources to the populace in a market system?