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Reasons not to buy from Amazon

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. Some of these sites may share some of Amazon's unethical practices. I am pretty sure that any site selling MP3 files on the internet imposes an EULA — an inexcusable wrong. Streaming sites, too. And all of them identify the purchaser. It is better to buy from a store, and pay cash. Or else get a copy through sharing.

For a book, order it directly from the publisher or through a local book store. If you want to use a URL to refer to a book, please don't use an Amazon page.

Here are specific reasons — plenty of them.

Size

Sabotaging Customers

Limiting the Use of Cash

Restricting and Shafting Customers

Censorship

Snooping

Exploiting workers mercilessly

Shafting others in the publishing world

Dodging taxes

Vendors

Other Reasons

Size

Amazon is so close to being a monopoly for internet sales by most companies that it can gouge them. It drives many of them into bankruptcy. If you do internet purchases, making a point of not buying through Amazon is a way you can personally push back.

*Amazon, Google parent Alphabet and Microsoft are being sued over imagesused to train their facial recognition technologies.*

Amazon biases its searches to favor vendors that use Amazon for their shipping. 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.

Sabotaging Customers

Limiting the use of Cash

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.

Restricting and Shafting Customers

Censorship

Amazon and Google have cut off domain-fronting, a feature used to enable people in tyrannical countries to reach communication systems that are banned there.

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).

Snooping

Exploiting workers mercilessly

Shafting others in the publishing world

Dodging taxes

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.

Vendors

Amazon sometimes chooses an expensive vendor by default — when the vendor pays for this preference.

Other reasons

Copyright (c) 2011-2019 Richard Stallman

Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are permitted provided this notice is preserved.