For current political commentary, see the daily political notes.
If you want to order a book (or something else), don't buy it from Amazon. Amazon harms its customers, as well as workers, the national treasury, and many others that it affects.
Here's a good (though long) overview of why Amazon's overall activity is harmful to society overall.
This page lists alternatives to Amazon for buying various kinds of products. These sites may share some of Amazon's unethical practices: identifying each custoimer and requiring per to run nonfree software (JavaSccript code sent to the browser). I refuse to do those things, so I do not use use any of those sites. But they may not be evil in some of the ways that Amazon is.
To avoid being the victim of digital injustice, buy from a physical store, paying cash, anonymously. That is what I do.
For videos, you can get a DVD. It may have DRM (always an injustice in itself), but at least there is free software to break the DRM on DVDs. However, it is morally better to get a non-oppressive copy through sharing.
For a printed book, order it directly from the publisher or through a local book store. A local independent book store lets me pay cash in advance to order a book, and not identify myself.
If you want to use a URL to identify a book, please don't use an Amazon page! Doing so promotes Amazon.
Robert Reich presents how Amazon uses its monopoly power to screw the independent sellers that find themselves effectively compelled to sell through Amazon -- and their customers too. The FTC is suing Amazon over this. Hooray for the FTC, but remember that Amazon surveillance is direct injustice to each customer, independent of its purely economic wrongs.
Here are other specific reasons — plenty of them.
Restricting and shafting customers
Exploiting workers mercilessly
Shafting others in the publishing world
If you do internet purchases, making a point of not buying through Amazon is a way you can personally push back.
If this isn't illegal, it ought to be. We should not allow a store as big as Amazon to have anything to do with order fulfillment, for its own sales or anyone else's.
Amazon has so much power over the US retail economy that it imposes its power over all participants.
If it is going to be a monopoly, it should be regulated like other monopolies. Or perhaps more.
Amazon has so much market share that its sheer size distorts the market.
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.
Amazon offered a "30-day free trial", and started paid subscriptions automatically at the end of it.
This is clearly an attempt to trick customers — wrong in all cases no matter how many companies do it.
Amazon's persistent blindness to certain fraudulent sales schemes makes it easy for fraudsters to invalidate Amazon's guarantee to purchasers.
Amazon closes the accounts of customers that send back a substantial fraction of products they buy. It has the additional effect of stealing any credit balance.
Amazon appears to have cooperated with the US government to intercept a Thinkpad keyboard purchased by a Tor developer. To install a spy device, presumably.
Amazon delays order processing for customers that have not paid a subscription fee for "prime" delivery.
Amazon locks in customers by getting them to pay in advance for "free shipping". Then it makes sellers raise their prices so they can pay to "qualify for prime", and to do that, they have to charge even higher prices in any other store.
Amazon's new grocery stores do not accept cash. They impose the same surveillance as ordering online from Amazon.
In addition, success of this would mean the loss of thousands of jobs.
Amazon distributes ebooks in a way that strips users of many freedoms (PDF or html).
Amazon's on-line music "sales" have some of the same problems as the ebooks: users are required to identify themselves and sign a contract that denies them the freedoms they would have with a CD.
The Amazon Swindle has a back door that can erase books. We found out about this when Amazon remotely erased thousands of copies of 1984. In response to criticism, Amazon promised it would never do this again unless ordered to by the state, which I find not very comforting.
Amazon did not keep that promise. In 2012 it wiped a user's Kindle and deleted her account, then offered her kafkaesque "explanations".
The Swindle has a universal back door through which that Amazon can forcibly change the software. This is called "auto-update". It puts the user helplessly at Amazon's mercy.
Amazon's book recommendations are not based honestly on algorithms that try to figure out what users might like. Publishers pay to have their books promoted this way.
Amazon rents textbooks to students with a requirement not to take them across state lines.
Amazon turns servile US public libraries into retail agents. Users have to register with Amazon and give their own email addresses. Then they get mail like this.
Subject: Your digital library loan expires soon
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 ...
From: digital-noreply@amazon.com
To: LIBRARY-USER'S-EMAIL-ADDRESS
Your digital library loan will expire in 3 days
Hello LIBRARY-USER'S-NAME
Your digital library book will expire in 3 days. If you purchase
/BOOK/ from the Kindle Store or borrow it again from your local
library, all of your notes and highlights will be preserved.
BOOK
(Author) AUTHOR
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/PAGE>
Amazon "sold" someone Disney Christmas videos (via remote access, not a local copy); subsequently Amazon, at Disney's command, cut off access for Christmas. This demonstrates why we should not trust remote hosting for copies of published works. Insist on having your own copy which is yours.
Amazon's service, that offers you an MP3 for CDs you bought there, respects your rights less than ripping the CDs yourself.
Amazon's complex financial arrangements bypass UK credit card consumer protection.
Amazon closes customers' accounts, which implies confiscating their money, if they return too many defective products.
The company refuses even to discuss why.
Amazon threatens to cut off customers if they return things more than occasionally. Amazon's customers nominally have the right to return merchandise — unless they exercise that right.
The strange irony of the article is that it is totally defeatist. It shows why we need to defeat Amazon, but assumes that that is impossible. It shows becoming dependent on Amazon is dangerous and then refuses to believe people could ever refuse.
You can't win by being defeatist. You can win by telling Amazon to drop dead.
I have never bought anything from Amazon. And I never will. Amazon knows my name because a friend, believing this was helpful, decided to get something for me and told Amazon to send it to my address, an act which made me feel violated. I hope nothing like that will ever happen again.
Amazon has joined with the MPAA to campaign for repression of sharing on the net.
Amazon cut off service to Wikileaks, claiming that whistleblowing violates its terms of service. It had no need to go to court to prove this, because if you rent a server from Amazon, you have no enforcible legal right to use it.
Amazon stopped distribution of an ebook that exposed how ebook bestseller lists can be manipulated (and are therefore meaningless).
This is a secondary wrong which makes those cameras a little more unjust. But they would be plenty unjust without this. When millions of people make videos of everyone that walks past their door, and hand the recordings over to a particular company to store, that's asking for abuse of the recordings. That kind of system should be prohibited.
Basically, you should be required to set up the camera so that it only sees people when they approach your door, not when they pass by on the sidewalk.
But don't worry — Amazon is learning how to talk the talk about privacy in a way that more people would find comforting.
A voice command system that is safe for its owner would be one that runs only free software, and does the whole job locally, communicating with other sites only when asked to. With the software inside free, the owner of this device would truly own it.
But even that would not respect the privacy of other people nearby. How to deal with that issue is not obvious.
The Amazon Echo seems to have a universal back door, which means that Amazon could convert it into full-time listening device at any time.
Since Amazon requires customers to identify themselves, it knows what each one has bought. That in itself is unacceptable, especially for books. I pay for books with cash only, and do not identify myself to any bookseller that takes note of which books I bought.
The Kindle Swindle informs Amazon when the user reads books that didn't come from Amazon. It also tells Amazon which pages each user reads.
The Amazon "Smart" TV is watching and listening all the time.
Emo Phillips once made this joke: The other day a woman came up to me and said, "Didn't I see you on television?" I said, "I don't know. You can't see out the other way." Evidently Amazon has made that joke obsolete.
The Amazon Echo Dot is designed to accustom children to surveillance-based marketing from a young age.
Amazon is in such a position of surveillance that it can exert substantial control over people's activities.
This is dangerous, and we should not allow Amazon to continue to track people as it does.
Facebook made a secret deal with Amazon to give Amazon access to Facebook's data about users. A plague on both of those companies!
Amazon and Google want "smart" gadgets to report all activity to them.
In other words, if you have a "smart" (read "spy") lightbulb with that proposed feature, and tell an Amazon or Google listening device about it, thenceforth any time you switched it on or off no matter how, it would send a report to Amazon or Google.
Even today, the only way to make "smart" products safe is to ensure they cannot connect to anyone else's systems.
Amazon keeps Alexa recordings and transcripts indefinitely.
*Amazon’s Ring Planned Neighborhood "Watch Lists" Built on Facial Recognition.*
Amazon gets access to video from Ring devices.
This was highlighted by the fact that some Ring employees who were authorized to look at the videos used that access for personal motives and were fired. There will always be employees who do this, and with Ring the uniformed thugs often can do it too, which is far more dangerous.
Setting up a system capable of systematic recognition of faces — or license plates — should be illegal, outside of very narrow circumstances.
Here's what data Amazon admits collecting from people that do business with it.
How to stop it? That's easy. First, don't buy from Amazon. Second, ask your friends not to give Amazon your name, address, or anything else. If that has already happened, that doesn't mean you have to let it happen again!
I can testify that it isn't hard, because I do that for _all_ online stores. The only exception I make is for prescriptions, since those have to be in my name.
The extra level of boycott that I do against Amazon is that, if someone is going to buy something for me -- either as a gift, or as a favor which I'm going to reimburse -- I say, "Please do _not_ get it from Amazon!"
It could try giving its workers decent pay and working conditions. Then they might continue working for Amazon.
This adds to the many other reasons not to buy from Amazon.
Amazon is putting cameras in delivery vans to monitor drivers. I hope the drivers go on a camera strike, all covering the cameras on the same day.
This includes using predictive policing to inflitrate possible union hot-spots and smear or harass employees who are liable to speak up about those issues.
Is Amazon paying them? Threatening them?
The workers don't have breaks even enough to go to the toilet.
Amazon Workers Sleep in Tents Near Firm's Scottish Depot to Avoid Travel Costs.
Amazon works its warehouse staff to the point of sickness and even death.
When workers at Amazon are injured, Amazon shafts them.
Amazon's shipping in the US is done in a sweatshop with paramedics standing by for workers who pass out from the heat.
Workers in an Amazon warehouse and shipping center walk all day under the orders of a computer, and are forbidden even to speak to each other.
A stress expert, looking at an undercover report about an Amazon warehouse, says these conditions make physical and mental illness more likely.
Working for Amazon makes staff physically and mentally ill.
Amazon pressures its "self-employed" delivery drivers to drive without seat belts; they aren't given time to go to the toilet so they have to piss and defacate in the car.
This is perhaps not as bad for the individual as being unemployed, which is what they will become when Amazon gets driverless delivery vans. But that does not make it acceptable.
Amazon pays Mechanical Turk workers as little as 2 dollars an hour, making the excuse that they are "independent contractors".
More on the horrible treatment of its workers.
When James Bloodworth investigated the Amazon warehouse by working in it, he found that no workers lasted the 9 months required to become regular employees.
It's not enough for the workers to do their jobs; they are also required to spout the ideology of devotion to the company.
As of 2018, 1/3 of Amazon employees in Arizona get food stamps, their pay is so low. In some other states, it's only 1/9 that get food stamps.
Amazon's office workers are better paid but they have to work 80 hours a week. That's even more time than I spend volunteering!
Only a union could stop Amazon's persistent mistreatment of its workers.
US Postal Service workers deliver lots of packages for Amazon, especially on Sundays. You can imagine how they are mistreated: some "part time" workers have to go weeks without a day off. The speedup is so intense that following the official safety procedures is not feasible.
Amazon advertised for staff to interfere with union organizing.
Amazon later said that ad was posted "in error", which probably means the hiring was supposed to be done quietly. Amazon has long made a practice of monitoring staff's discussions about unionization.
"Tips" to Doordash and Amazon food delivery workers go to the company rather than to the worker, they cancel out the whole of the worker's base pay.
The article seems to err in equating this to tipping of waiters. They are not the same system. Yes, the waiter's base pay is below minimum wage — but the restaurant does not claw back that base pay when the waiter gets a tip, as Doordash and Amazon do.
If you are thinking of buying a holiday present from Amazon, look at the crushing treatment of workers that you'd be supporting.
Amazon's harsh working conditions and workloads result in a rate of injury 50% higher than in competing companies.
Amazon squeezes small publishers. For instance, Amazon cut off Swindle sales for an independent book distributor in order to press for bigger discounts. (The article ends by promoting ebooks for another platform, the Shnook from Barnes and Noble. While that company is not as nasty to small publishers, its ebooks do violate your freedom in most of the same ways.)
Amazon doesn't just compete with independent book stores, it arrogantly seeks to destroy them. Independent book stores urge people not to buy from Amazon.
Amazon appears to treat self-published authors well, but it can unilaterally cut the price of their books. And when it does, the authors are the ones who lose.
Amazon is lowering the pay for short self-published works by changing to pay per page read (sometimes as low as $0.006 per page).
Amazon is bad for books and writing.
Amazon is demonstrating its dangerous power by punishing one publisher with all sorts of unofficial discouragements to buy.
We should not allow any bookstore to be as big as Amazon.
Amazon's hardball tactics against a publisher show its dangerous power.
Not that Hachette deserves any sympathy. The point is that we need to break Amazon's power.
*All hail Jeff Bezos the philanthropist! The rest of us will just keep paying our taxes.*
Bezos thanked Manchin for blocking a tax increase on corporations.
At least 10% of Amazon's success is due to avoiding the taxes that physical book stores pay.
Amazon's tax avoidance means it sucks money out of your country's economy.
Amazon charges publishers for 20% sales tax in the UK even though the tax it pays is 3%.
UK independent bookstores condemn Amazon for not paying taxes as they do.
Amazon reorganized its EU structure in 2015 so it will pay a little tax on its sales to EU countries, but not much.
Amazon bullied Seattle into retracting a tax increase by threatening to abandon expansion plans there. Seattle caved in, but Amazon has cancelled the plans anyway.
Amazon is not merely an snooping abusive monopolist. It is a cheating snooping abusive monopolist.
The gator is better placed to stand up to Amazon's bullying than a small manufacturer, but the result is a second layer of oligopoly.
Amazon sometimes chooses an expensive vendor by default — when the vendor pays for this preference.
Please do not refer to such bullshit-generator systems as "artificial intelligence"!
The Federal Trade Commission accuses Amazon of tricking millions of customers into subscribing to Amazon Prime, using a dark pattern, and then using another dark pattern to impede them from cancelling.
*I Want You Back: Getting My Personal Data From Amazon Was Weeks of Confusion and Tedium.* It uses a dark pattern to make it slow and inconvenient.
This is sadly ironic, because buying them via Amazon is not eco-friendly.
Amazon is creating subsidiaries that act like "third-party" sellers, to compete with the real third-party sellers.
This is one more example of how Amazon cooperates with various other parties so as to get more power, then betrays them. Amazon has done wrong to readers, authors, bookstores, as well as its workers. And now to the companies that accepted it as a nearly-monopolistic market.
Due to a paywall, I cannot access the article that reported on this, and even if I saw a copy I would not post a reference to it. But I am confident that it would not have reported this without convincing evidence.
Amazon supports Breitbart, the right-wing extremist site, by advertising there.
Amazon in Germany hired "security" guards from a company of Nazi sympathizers to repress foreign workers. Reporters came to cover this, and the guards tried to arrest them and take their cameras.
After a bug in software Amazon's servers used caused Amazon to sell many products for one penny, Amazon takes no responsibility and dumped the loss on the sellers.
Amazon was a member of ALEC. ALEC is the right-wing lobbying group that promotes voter-suppression laws and "shoot first" laws, as well as attacks against wages and working conditions in the US.
Amazon quit ALEC after public pressure in May 2012, but I am sure it still supports the same nasty policies and is waiting for a new tool to achieve them.
A study found that people who read novels on the Amazon Swindle remember less of the the events in the novel.
I think issues like this are less important than the injustice of the Swindle.
Amazon heavily promotes medical quackery.
When people return products to Amazon, in many cases Amazon doesn't bother to unpack them and put them on the shelf. It puts them in the trash.
Amazon has made it painfully difficult to terminate membership in Amazon Prime.
Amazon collects data about everything a user does while looking at amazon.com, and uses this to compete unfairly with the independent companies that sell across amazon.com.
Copyright (C) 2011-2022 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are permitted, provided this notice is preserved