> This doesn’t make sense, how is your preferred range of attention expenditure even relevant?
This is an ironic statement, insofar as it's myopic.
The implication was clearly a monopoly by market availability (convenience), which is not a legal precept, but a sociological one. Comparing rates across all possible locales and vendors is impractical. This is part of what makes Amazon so successful. Sheer momentum.
If a dozen different HN users expressed a dozen different preferred ranges… would there now have to be viable competitors at each possible step?