Tim Wu

And more and more sellers came, more and more buyers came.

And so the Amazon marketplace took over eBay and became very successful.

And at that point, I would say, you know, maybe around 2010 or something like that, was fulfilling what I would call the dream of the internet age, which is a lot of people would be able to go in this place,

start their thing, make a lot of money.

It coincides with the rise of the blog and small online magazines, you know, that whole era that we are talking about.

During that period, Amazon's take was below 20%.

It kind of depends how you count.

But, you know, somewhere between 15-20%.

Their take of what a small business is selling.

Of the sales, yeah.

So if you sold $100, they'd take $20.

I mean, it depended a little bit.

There were some storage fees and so on.

So it was a good place to make money.

What changed, I think, was once Amazon had confidence that it had its sellers and it had its buyers more or less locked up.

This is basically over the 2010s.

They bought a couple companies that were potential threats to them.

Diapers.com, for example.

It might seem ridiculous, but diapers, you know, could have been a kind of a way in to threaten them.

Why don't you tell the diapers.com story for a minute?