Is Amazon's growth anticompetitive?

Amazon's focus on growing market share with low prices has benefited consumers but given it a big share of the online market.

• In 2013, it sold more than its next twelve online competitors combined. 
• By some estimates, Amazon now captures 46% of online shopping 
• In addition to being a retailer, it is a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading provider of cloud server space and computing power. 
• Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth—reporting double-digit increases in net sales yearly—it reports meager profits, choosing to invest aggressively instead. 
• The company listed consistent losses for the first seven years it was in business, with debts of $2 billion. ...ts highest yearly net income was still less than 1% of its net sales.

Despite its low income, investors have bid up its stock price in anticipation that its size will eventually pay off:

• Despite the company’s history of thin returns, investors have zealously backed it: Amazon’s shares trade at over 900 times diluted earnings, making it the most expensive stock in the Standard & Poor’s 500
• ...critics often fumble to explain how a company that has so clearly delivered enormous benefits to consumers—not to mention revolutionized e-commerce in general—could, at the end of the day, threaten our markets. Trying to make sense of the contradiction, one journalist noted that the critics’ argument seems to be that “even though Amazon’s activities tend to reduce book prices, which is considered good for consumers, they ultimately hurt consumers.”

The linked article tries to make a case that the antitrust authorities should intervene now, but they it not address an obvious solution, if Amazon starts behaving anticompetitively, the antitrust authorities can act when it does.

HT:  Quinn