(Washington)

In what could either be a big worry for tech or a pile of unwarranted hot air, there are rumors circulating that President Trump may be obsessed with regulating Amazon. Last week, the president escalated his calls for regulating the company, tweeting “I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election … Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!”. Trump has also repeatedly attacked the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Trump’s 2020 campaign manager said in a tweet that “Amazon has probably 10x the data on every American that Facebook does. All that data and own a political newspaper, The Washington Post. Hmm.....”.

FINSUM: Our other perspectives aside, we do think governments may need to adopt updated views of when regulation is called for. In Amazon’s case, the company is clearly not a monopoly in any sector, but the data it has does give it heightened importance. The context of monopoly laws, which are essentially modeled on 19th century ideas, don’t seem to have much scope to account for this.