Amazon.com has adjusted its product-search system to more prominently feature listings that are more profitable for the company, said people who worked on the project—a move, contested internally, that could favor Amazon’s own brands.
Late last year, these people said, Amazon optimized the secret algorithm that ranks listings so that instead of showing customers mainly the most-relevant and best-selling listings when they search—as it had for more than a decade—the site also gives a boost to items that are more profitable for the company.
Might I also point out that Amazon is cutting the healthcare benefits of Whole Foods temporary workers while Jeff Bezos earns about 1300 dollar per second?
Ethics aren’t exactly high on tech companies’ agendas.
It’s not unethical to prop up one’s own products on a self-created store.
haus,
Some do make that argument, the ethical problems arise when the corporations doing it have such dominant control over the market. When Microsoft/Apple/Amazon/Google/etc promote their own products in their respective platforms, these aren’t just any stores, these are monopolies/oligopolies that control access to the market. While I ostensibly agree with your point, it is when you look at the net effect that you see how harmful biased algorithms can be for market competition. And it’s not just hypothetical, we are witnessing mass consolidation towards a handful of dominant companies controlling the markets. If we are unwilling or unable to regulate them, then we’ve pretty much reached the end of capitalism as a means for fostering competition.
Their store, their rules.
Now if you want a more fair world, it would imply some regulation from the governments to impose common commercial rules.
But eeeek, government regulation, that’s so against capitalism, this is so much socialism. Bad. Bad.
Kochise,
Yes but at what point to we step in and do something when they get too big? Antitrust came about from the recognition that dominant companies controlled everything and that wasn’t good for society or even capitalism. It’s not that we like government regulation, it’s just that it’s necessary to maintain balance against the abuses of virtually unstoppable corporations holding all the power.
If we just employ laissez-faire across the board and are determined to never intervene to improve market competition, then we know exactly where that ends up: insanely wealthy families running the country, full control of markets, washington owned by corporations, and any semblance of competition being squashed before they can even get off the ground. We’re already suffering from these imbalances as today’s mega-corporations take a bigger piece of the pie than most people on earth put together and it’s only getting worse.
If concentration goes too far, we could even revert back to the time of robber barrons.
I’m not surprised.
Nor should anybody be. They’re promoting their products (or the most profitable ones) over ones that aren’t?
This is expected behavior. It is unreasonable to expect otherwise, nor is it problematic that a storefront does that.
I mean, come on.