Deepa Seetharaman at Reuters says:

Amazon.com Inc later this year plans to launch a marketplace for local services, a broad term that encompasses anything from babysitters to handymen, several people familiar with the matter said.

Amazon plans to start in one market to test demand and logistics before rolling it out nationwide, mirroring its approach to its grocery delivery service, Amazon Fresh. Fresh was tested in Seattle for years before expanding to San Francisco and Los Angeles last year.

Ever since the internet started its hike to ubiquity, entrepreneurs have tried to figure out ways to digitize the local services that don't translate well to internet. Kozmo.com was an early attempt at this. Yelp is kind of successful at this sort of thing, but building a listing for every business isn't the same as actually getting a cut of that business.

Like most of Amazon's ideas, this is a genius scheme that gets creepier and creepier as more people buy into it. Imagine if, back in the 1950s, a telephone company had figured out a way to snare a commission every time you called a plumber to fix a leak. If Amazon can establish itself as a referrer of local businesses, they can demand a cut from the pay of every babysitter, every tree surgeon, every house painter they refer to their customers. They could pit independent contractors against one another in a battle of low-balling that consumers would love because they get the lowest price, but that workers would hate, because their dependence on Amazon would increase while their profits sink lower and lower. I have no doubt Amazon can pull this off, and I think the world will be a poorer place for it.