How Multiven Aims to End Amazon’s Market Dominance

“Antitrust law isn’t about protecting competing businesses from each other. It’s about protecting competition itself on behalf of the public” — Senator Al Franken

Introduction

Amazon is the world’s largest Internet company by revenue. Jeff Bezos’ online mega mall generated sales of $233 Billion in 2018, which represents a 30% year-over-year growth. In today’s e-commerce environment, sales through Amazon account for almost one out of every two dollars spent online.

Alas, Jeff Bezos’ brainchild has a clear stranglehold on the market.

But this position of clear dominance does come at a price. Amazon is one of the triumvirate of companies (the other two being Google and Facebook) which have established themselves as the undisputed leaders in their respective niche markets of e-commerce, search engine, and social media, respectively. These entities have fought long and hard to entrench their commercial identities deep into the consumers’ psyche, with one goal, and one goal only: The elimination of choice.

If a friend is looking to buy a book online, the first thing they are likely to do is to look it up on Amazon (and probably find it). Equally, ‘googling’ something has become an everyday occurrence. You probably do it several times a day. And what other social media platforms are there to use, other than Facebook, really? Instagram!, I hear someone shouting in the back. True, the only problem is that it belongs to Facebook.

Think about how far down the rabbit hole people have been driven by these three Internet giants. These centralised companies have used their considerable financial clout to achieve complete and utter nullification of choice, sometimes using methods which are questionable at best, bordering on illegality.

Amazon is certainly no stranger to controversy. The retailer picked up a fight with long-established French publisher Hachette back in 2012, for instance. What started off as a contractual dispute evolved into an all-out and protracted legal battle that culminated in a deal between the two parties, whereby Hachette retained control over the pricing of its books sold through Amazon. The internet giant also struck a similar deal with Simon & Schuster back in 2015.

Both Hachette and Simon & Schuster fought back against Amazon’s hegemony and scored a victory of sorts. They were able to do so because both publishing houses have been in business much longer than Amazon, and have the legal and financial firepower to take on Amazon’s own legal team.

There have been many other smaller or independent publishers however that simply couldn’t afford lengthy and costly battles inside a court room, and were either swallowed by the titan’s maw, or priced into submission by Amazon’s aggressive marketing tactics.

The end result of this strategy is the elimination of competition, and thus, the end of choice.

Multiven: A broadside into Amazon’s bow

Few would dispute Amazon’s predominance in the e-commerce landscape today. The online retailer stands tall, but not undisputed.

Enter the Multiven Open Marketplace (MOM), a start-up blockchain-based marketplace designed for the global Information Technology products and services industry, a market worth around €4 Trillion per year.

Multiven is aiming to fire a broadside just below Amazon’s waterline, the first shot in the bid to end the colossus’s monopolizing reign and dominion of e-commerce.

Multiven is the brainchild of British-Nigerian technology entrepreneur, Peter Alfred-Adekeye, a man who is himself no stranger to scoring big victories against mighty foes.

Back in 2008, Multiven, under Peter’s leadership, challenged Cisco in the courtroom over the latter’s forced monopoly of the Internet network software services market. Multiven alleged that Cisco maintained a stranglehold on the sector by tying bug fixes and software patches to its maintenance services. In other words, if you purchased networking equipment from Cisco, you were immediately bound to purchase its maintenance service (“Smartnet”) in order to get access to software updates that correct the Cisco-made defects in your purchased software.

Such practice, while wrapped in legality through contractual terms, was far from fair. The battle went on for some time, with Cisco engaging in smearing tactics to paint Peter in a negative light over his Nigerian origins. But in the end, justice prevailed, and Peter and Multiven won a decisive victory that meant the end of Cisco’s chokehold on the multi-Billion dollar per year market for the maintenance of the software that runs the Internet.

Toppling Amazon with the Multiven-Open-Marketplace (MOM)

Multiven intends to disrupt the existing electronic commerce industry with the Multiven Open Marketplace (MOM), a blockchain-based, decentralized, peer-to-peer marketplace where people can buy and sell new, pre-owned, and recycled computer and networking hardware like phones, laptops, servers, routers, firewalls etc., and also trade software licenses and services, using smart contracts. The MOM removes intermediaries and smashes geographical borders.

All transactions on the MOM ecosystem will be carried out solely with Multiven’s own ERC-20 compliant token, the MultiCoin (MTCN).

Just as Internet-based commerce is now preferred to physically going to shops, blockchain-commerce will ultimately overtake e-commerce someday because of its superior technological features and the MOM is positioned to be one of the new giants of the blockchain.

Thanks for reading!

Fernando Sanchez

www.multiven.io — The world’s first blockchain-based marketplace for the global €4 Trillion Information Technology products and services Industry.