The rumble in the (Amazon) jungle features Jeff Bezos in one corner and basically every other person and company with even a tangential interest in ecommerce in the other. And so far, the match isn’t even Jeffing close. “Today, Bezos controls nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States. More product searches are conducted on Amazon than on Google, which has allowed Bezos to build an advertising business as valuable as the entirety of IBM. One estimate has Amazon Web Services controlling almost half of the cloud-computing industry—institutions as varied as General Electric, Unilever, and even the CIA rely on its servers. Forty-two percent of paper book sales and a third of the market for streaming video are controlled by the company; Twitch, its video platform popular among gamers, attracts 15 million users a day. Add The Washington Post to this portfolio and Bezos is … arguably the most powerful man in American culture.” Franklin Foer in The Atlantic: Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan. (I hope the plan includes a way for me to get rid of all these cardboard boxes…)

+ “Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia, said, ‘Amazon is a microeconomist’s wet dream. If you’re a consumer, it’s perfect for maximizing the efficiency of finding what you want and getting it as cheap and fast as possible. But, the thing is, most of us aren’t just consumers. We’re also producers, or manufacturers, or employees, or we live in cities where retailers have gone out of business because they can’t compete with Amazon, and so Amazon kind of pits us against ourselves.'” Charles Duhigg in The New Yorker: Is Amazon Unstoppable?