Welcome to the Tech Mem Ride Home for Thursday, December 5th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the

FTC might be broadening its look into Amazon. The new flagship Snap Dragon ships are interesting because they don't have 5G in them. A disc-free Xbox might be coming, Check-ins with Slack, Imager, and Robin Hood, and Craig'sless

enters the 21st century. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

As the behind the scene investigations of the tech giants by various agencies rolls on, I'm somewhat loath to cover all of the drip drip of rumors and details

leaking out. I mean, it would be endless and probably become monotonous. So we'll probably largely wait until the time comes that actual charges are

filed or about to be filed if that day ever comes. But this little wrinkle

does seem important to me even if on the surface it's just another rumor.

Sources are telling Bloomberg that the Federal Trade Commission and its investigators who have been looking into Amazon's e-commerce business practices have widened

their scope to begin asking software companies about Amazon's practices with AWS. But if these sources are to be believed, it does seem that if AWS also comes

into the FTC's crosshairs, it's because the FTC thinks it's seeing a larger pattern here, quoting Bloomberg.

AWS accounted for 60% of Amazon's operating income in the most recently reported 12 months. The unit's profitability in

recent years has helped keep investors happy even as the company continues to

spend heavily to expand both its retail and cloud computing businesses.

Amazon also sells an array of products both its retail and cloud computing businesses.

Amazon also sells an array of products that run on top of those basic services,

such as databases, machine learning tools, and data warehousing products.

It competes with hundreds of other software companies large and

small that offers similar products. One issue the FTC could look at is whether Amazon

has an incentive to discriminate against those software companies which sell their

products to clients of AWS while at the same time competing with Amazon.

The fear is that Amazon could punish the companies that work with other cloud providers and favor those. The marketplace where third-party sellers depend on the platform to reach customers

because of its size but in many cases they also compete with Amazon's own

...