In Tech, Populism is Trumping Politics

A day before it delivered relatively good earnings to Wall Street last week, Amazon.com Inc. got roughed up in a New York City Council hearing over the company’s plans to locate half of second headquarters in Long Island City, Queens. “It’s a cold day in New York,” shouted one union organizer at a rowdy protest outside City Hall, “but it’s not as cold as Jeff Bezos’s heart.”

At the same time, 7,000 miles away, Amazon was suffering a more serious setback. In its most promising international market, India, regulators started enforcing new rules that preclude Amazon and its chief rival, the Walmart subsidiary Flipkart, from selling goods directly to customers or investing directly in third-party merchants that sell on its website. The new regulation means Amazon will have to pull over one third of its products—everything from diapers to Alexa speakers.