The War of Amazon, Apple and Other Near-Monopolies

Amazon has announced that it will stop selling Google Chromecast and Apple TV devices at the end of the month. Why? Because these devices don’t fully work with Amazon's streaming video service. Amazon is apparently willing to anger some of its customers in order to deliver a competitive edge to its own streaming services.

We’ll get to the morality and wisdom of this move in a minute, but let’s stop to note that this is yet another skirmish in a long battle between the tech giants of our era. Four companies -- Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple -- are all jockeying to control as much of our technology experience as possible. A legal expert that I interviewed a few years back called it “the war of the APIs,” but it goes well beyond that. Each company is trying to leverage the dominance it has in one area to push into as many other areas as possible, while simultaneously trying to undercut the other firms that are already there.