It's eminently solvable. Make the practice illegal. Or break up big companies. Or you progressively tax on revenue, so it becomes increasingly inefficient to a mega corporation. Or require companies above a certain size become increasingly worker owned.

Amazon doesn't need to be so big and in so many industries. My pharmacy doesn't also need to be a movie studio. My cloud provider doesn't also need to be a self publishing business. It distorts too many things.

> What can we do about it? Not much.

You should do what I do: look for someplace else to buy from first. Amazon has "everything" - if you can find it. However there are usually small sellers of that niche (often niche.com) where they know something about the product and will direct your to the best one without adds. The smaller/weirder the niche the more likely this seller is to be helpful. You get to support "the little guy", and get a good product for a good price. Even if Amazon is cheaper, the smaller store is still the better value because you get a good product.

I don’t give Amazon my money, that’s something most people have the agency to do. There are many, many other places to order from on the internet.

The ads make sense in capitalism. Without the described effect products would never change. Payment for ads ensures discovery works in adversarial free market.

The problem is that the pay for that goes to Amazon instead of your pockets. I think Brave was actually on to something.