Monopoly Enshittified Amazon
pluralistic.netInteresting call to action for nerds:
> Anti-monopoly measures are slow and ponderous tools, but when it comes to tech companies, we have faster, more nimble ones. If we want to make it easy to compete with Amazon, we could – for example – use Adversarial Interoperability to turn it into a dumb pipe:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/01/dumb-pipes/#original-asin
> That is, we could let local merchants use Amazon's ASIN system to tag their own inventory and produce a realtime database. Customers could browse Amazon to find the things they wanted, with a browser plugin that turned "Buy It Now" into "Buy It Now at Joe's Hardware":
https://doctorow.medium.com/view-a-sku-32721d623aee
I was going to say it reminded me of an extension I use to look up books in local libraries (and openlibrary) but turns out that was the inspiration:
> It was inspired by Library Extension, a browser plugin that notices if you're looking at a book on Amazon and adds a "Reserve at your local library" button to the page, over the "Add to your cart" button.