10.

Why?

Because Fridays are awesome.

And this Friday show is centered on one big topic, because in the business world there are fewer big topics that Amazon in 1995 it had begun, is a retail website that sold books and not much else from there.

What's grown a bit.

Amazon sells most of the stuff you could buy at a mall and a grocery store and many other types of stores.

To it offers online content, cloud computing, and it not only still sells books, it helps people publish them.

Last year, Amazon became the second company behind Apple, whose total market value exceeded $1 trillion.

Amazon did that in 24 years, a relatively short amount of time to get that valuable.

Its founder, Jeff Bezos, is one of the two richest people on the planet.

He and Microsoft co founder Bill Gates are each worth more than $100 billion but Amazon has seen its share of bumps in the road.

The company's been criticized in the past for what it pays its employees.

Two years ago, for instance, half of its employees earn less than $28,000.

That was roughly 20,000 less than the average wage in America.

And thousands of retail stores have shut down in recent years, with tens of thousands of retail jobs lost because Americans have been spending less time shopping in stores and more time shopping on sites like Amazon.

Also, privacy advocates have raised concerns about Amazon's echo, and the other smart speakers like it because they're always listening.

Who else could have access to your conversations?

Besides Alexa, Amazon is massive.

It has more than 650,000 employees around the world.

It's complicated, like some of the challenges it's faced and created.

It's also changing the way the world buys goods.

And here goes the ultimate grab and go shopping experience.

Really grab it off the shelves and go.

You used the ab doer into the store.

Once you're in, you can put the phone away and you shop the rest of the store just like you would any other store with one key difference.

When you're done, you could just walk out.

Nothing is simple about the technology behind this cashier list store.

The Amazon Go market uses artificial intelligence to monitor what you've reached for on the shelf and to make sure you're charged for what you walked out with and nothing else.

Well, we had to do.

Unique in this year's case was built a sensors.

The cameras are these cameras, cameras, the cameras in the ceiling.

We had to build a specific machine learning algorithms.

The problem that we have to solve in Amazon Go is who took what?

When I take this item off the shelf, it's in my virtual card.

When I put it back, the item goes back.

It's an easy problem to solve, and you have a single person in the store booking this.

Multiple people, a lot of products if you look around the very similar to each other.

So that's where the challenge comes in.

The Amazon Go store is by no means the only place where Amazon uses a I.

We've got hundreds of teams working on artificial intelligence programs across Amazon artificial intelligence like machine learning powers, the simplicity that we always want to offer to our customers, whether it's fulfilling orders or delivering packages.

Those teams are working constantly to improve the customer's experience inside Amazons warehouses.

A.

I is hard at work.

These are Amazon Robotics.

Dr.

Units, once a customer actually purchases an item either on their mobile app on their computer or laptop, the system identifies the pod where the item is actually located in a field and the baht maps out the most efficient way through using machine learning to get that pod, which has that item that that customer purchased to the associate.

So there's some people out there that will hear robots machine learning A, I think drops they're gonna be gone.

But we've actually determined when we've actually deployed our solutions in their fulfillment networks is that actually we're relying a lot more on our associates.

We've increased their efficiency, and it really gives them the ability to work on different tasks.

And we've actually grown our associate employments across the globe today.

Alexa, order dog biscuits.

And, of course, one booth.

Aye, aye.

Tool you're most familiar with.

What I found is always learning new tricks, achieving what Alexa is right now with super hard challenge going from that to the future.

I would like Alexa to respond to the your mood, your sentiment, your feelings as expressed in your speech.

The one key advantage we have is we now have so much more data.

So is it a big challenge?

Yes, I'll be up to the challenge.

A kiss on the evolution of Alexa is it's still in its infancy.

Is it a toddler now or she a teller?

Now an adolescent teenager certainly hasn't graduated from college.

No, uh, hasn't graduated from college over.

All right, and I think a I as a field is in its infancy.

I think you're fit as a order toddler.

You know who's going to grow up to be an adult.

That just stuns us with her brilliance.

Right is where we are, huh?

Is Amazon a monopoly?

Well, it's not really an easy question to answer.

First, you have to understand what the Corps tenant of Jeff Bezos is.

Business philosophy is patients go back to the original letter that Jeff Bezos wrote investors in 1997.

He wrote that investors to Amazon shouldn't expect Amazon to operate like most companies because Amazon wouldn't judge itself by short term profits.

You know anything that every other company cares about on Lee, the long term in Bezos and Amazon stayed true to that first few years.

Amazon barely made a profit, invested billions of dollars back into the business, and it just kept growing and growing and growing and growing.

And now that patience has paid off with incredible profits over the last few years.

We all know on some level what a monopoly is.

We've played the game, but in the context of antitrust laws, a specific opinions meant to stop a company from forming that can dominate the market in such a way that competition is impossible.

Those who do not think Amazon has a monopoly say that because Amazon is offering its customers lower prices, it can't possibly be anti trust case.

Those low prices are a benefit to consumer welfare, and it would be impossible to regulate exactly how low is too low for prices.

The lode star of antitrust enforcement is.

How are consumers affected to consumers pay more?

Do they have less choice?

Then it's time for the n.

I trust cops to get on the beat.

This is David Balto.

He worked on antitrust cases for the Justice Department and the FTC for years and a skeptical about Amazon being a monopoly when consumers air paying less and have a greater amount of choice, which seems to be the simple message from Amazon's business model.

There's not a reason for intense antitrust scrutiny, but some say that business model is a direct threat to customers.

This is Lena conjures, a lawyer who has really helped shape the debate around Amazon and antitrust people like her Amazons.

Willingness to sustain massive losses isn't just a savvy business move.

It's an example of predatory pricing.

Predatory pricing is when a company prices a good below cost and is doing so basically in order to drive out its competitors so that it is able to kind of enjoy a dominant place in the market.

All of those things are a really high bar for the government to prove.

And because of that, a successful case on predatory pricing hasn't been litigated in decades.

That's not for a lack of will.

We certainly at the FTC and the Clinton administration had predatory pricing investigations.

But at the end of the day, you have to convince yourself that consumers would be better off if you stop these practices, and that's like looking for a unicorn.

But to those who do think Amazon right now is acting as a monopoly.

The government's view of predatory pricing is outdated.

The reality is with tech companies, you have a marketplace where that is winner take all.

So if your Facebook or an Amazon or Google, your main goal is to try and acquire a CZ many users as possible at the very earliest stages.

Because once you have a lot of users, it's gonna be much more difficult for arrivals to divert users away from you.

And so in that scenario, predatory pricing actually becomes very rational.

It's important to note that the question of predatory pricing is really only one of the questions surrounding Amazon.

They're also concerns about just how large Amazon has become is a business.

So in addition to be an online retailer, it also is a huge content.

Producers is a book publisher, has a huge cloud computing service.

The fact that Amazon is involved in all these different lines of business positions that to use its dominance in the online space in order to benefit of other lines of businesses.

And I think that's something that's really problematic, what we want from a consumer's perspective is for those people who provide service is for us to use the bargaining leverage of having all those customers to lower costs as much as possible.

And that's fundamentally what Amazon has done.

So whether Amazon has an unfair advantage over competitors, whether it's a monopoly, all those things aren't open to bait.

But what is not a debate is right now.

Amazon is winning.