This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Friday, July 28th, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

Amazon Prime, Prime Day, plowing all those profits back into the company, the acquisition

of Whole Foods, TV production, and the resulting Emmy Awards, and of course revolutionizing

publishing.

Is it time to call Amazon a monopoly?

Cato senior fellow Walter Olson considers the question.

There have been a lot of think pieces, I guess you would call them about Amazon and its growth, especially in light of its

recent acquisition of Whole Foods, that Amazon constitutes a monopoly. So as a matter of economics and law, and I understand that these are two different things when we're talking

about what a monopoly is, what constitutes a monopoly?

I don't think anyone has a really good definition and especially not in an area like this

in which the technological state of the market, the transformation brought by new technologies,

both of communication and of delivery, have so transformed the markets that Amazon operates in.

A few years ago, it was clear that some commerce was moving online. It was not so clear that there would be

powerful network benefits as Amazon discovered, especially when it launched Amazon Prime and other loyalty programs based on benefits like free shipping.

Competitors like Walmart.com are still important, but this is a relatively new situation,

not that Amazon has not been growing, not that it has not been sinking its revenues into improving its network

rather than paying large dividends and that sort of thing but the success of a few of the stratagems has gotten everyone's

attention and has suggested that for a while at least, and one of the big questions is whether this is a stable monopoly or network

effect or whether it's just going to be replaced by someone else's innovation five years from now.

But at the moment, Amazon has pulled to itself a higher share of web commerce than people were expecting and with the acquisition of whole foods, which is widely seen as being a camel's nose in the tent,

not to sell the nation a whole lot of specialized and highly costly luxury goods of the sort associated with the whole foods,

but rather that this will be the way in which they learn in grocery retail and that they will,

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