A quick rundown of some one-time must-haves that have gone missing:

• A soft landing: Republicans went back and forth last time about how to gradually phase out the ACA's Medicaid expansion; which formula to use in setting new caps on the program's spending; and how to make new premium subsidies more generous. Graham-Cassidy comes with a steep cliff after which all funding for both the subsidies and Medicaid expansion would disappear.
• Opioid funding: A former must-have for moderate Republicans, it's not in the new bill at all.
• Taxes: Conservatives like Sens. Tom Cotton, Pat Toomey and David Perdue have complained about the ACA's taxes for years. Graham-Cassidy would leave many of the ACA taxes in place (a big reason why Sen. Rand Paul opposes it).
• Pre-existing conditions: Any number of Republican senators said they wanted to retain the ACA's protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Graham-Cassidy would let states waive parts of those regulations.
• Coverage estimates: The Congressional Budget Office said yesterday it will be able to determine whether the bill would meet the Senate's budget rules, but could not deliver estimates next week about its effects on premiums, the federal deficit, or the number of uninsured Americans.
• A clear path through the House: The House has way more Republicans from blue states than the Senate does. Some representatives from New York have already raised concerns, and we're sure to hear more from California, New Jersey, Michigan and other states do the same.

Gorka's first outing with the group: He's co-headlining a rally with Sarah Palin in Montgomery, Alabama on Thursday night. The Palin-Gorka rally will promote Roy Moore, the controversial anti-establishment candidate running against incumbent Sen. Luther Strange.

The quick read:

• Competing with Amazon means being different than Amazon, such as by offering expert-curated content. If your value prop is efficiency, then don't bother.
• Internationalization is key.
• Young brands on Amazon run the risk of being private-labeled.
• E-commerce is not too popular among today's entrepreneurs.
• He wants Walmart to hold its own vs. Amazon, but doesn't sound optimistic.

Chinese parallel:

Alibaba is by far the dominant e-commerce company in China with 80% market share, but there is still enough vibrancy for other companies like JD.com and VIPshop to also do well. Commerce is not a game where winner takes all… There's a purpose to different sorts of companies and platforms.

Think different:

How can you do something different from Amazon, like having professionally-generated content? Houzz is a perfect example, offering expert-curated products and help for people looking to remodel part of their home. Amazon just isn't geared to build that sort of community. Or a company like Poshmark, where you have lots of users sharing and selling what's in their closet. A lot of them have become influencers because other users like their style. It's what Pinterest should have done with commerce but didn't. Amazon sells clothes, but it sells them like it sells a PC or a phone. Fashion is about having different parts that go well together, which means curation. [Ed note: Both Houzz and Poshmark are GGV portfolio companies]

Won't Amazon still ape the best ones?

Google tried to do Facebook, but learned that social has different DNA than search. Amazon's DNA is about absolute efficiency and speed. Whatever you order, they want to make sure you get it as quickly as possible, and are very focused on Prime users. And they can do that faster and cheaper than anybody else. But most of the products that do well on Amazon are in commoditized product categories. That's why we're interested in something like Houzz, because its product category isn't very commoditized.

Or go back to the Poshmark influencers. How do you work with them to get them to want to stay on your platform to build followings? It's something Amazon's been trying to do but not really proven able to replicate. And it's not surprising, given its DNA. Even look at Alibaba in China. With all of its might, it's never been very good at social, because doing something that requires social networking is a different skillset than doing commerce.

If you just buy something from me, I don't care if we're friends. That's commerce. It helps if you like and trust me, but it's not required. And it definitely doesn't require you to tell me what you need so I'll build it for you. It's just not essential. The transaction is commoditized and doesn't require a lot of social interaction. Whereas if I am trying to sell a piece of clothing and I'm a social influencer, you follow me because you're inspired by my style. That's a very different relationship.

Buying into new brands:

Amazon has done very well in private label. They look at what's selling well on Amazon and then go to suppliers in China and private label it. That makes Amazon a threat, directly or indirectly, to a lot of brands that aren't already well known. So we look at young brands that we think can do a good job of building a following on social media, particularly if the price-point is mass market and we believe we can help them scale it globally... A big key is not just focusing on the U.S., particularly since there are lots of international markets where Amazon hasn't yet focused too much, so it's easier to go toe-to-toe.

Will Amazon make another big acquisition like Whole Foods?

Not for a while. I think they will focus on digesting Whole Foods. Grocery is the hardest one to crack for any e-commerce company. If you go to that Amazon store in Seattle it's an amazing experience, but it will take time to figure out how to scale that and integrate it into Whole Foods stores.

Walmart's future market share:

As a stakeholder in the e-commerce ecosystem, we definitely want Walmart to be a major player. What I worry about is that you have a team at Amazon that will work themselves until eight or ten at night making things better, and a Walmart team that goes home at 5 or 6. So I don't know. History tends to show that the team that's the hungriest and can sustain their drive the longest tend to win out.

E-commerce startup pipeline:

I think commerce is not currently a big problem that most founders in the Bay Area wake up thinking they want to solve. More of them are moving to AI, machine learning and pure tech stuff.

• India:
  • Star India, 21st Century Fox's TV unit, which reaches 720 million viewers in eight different Indian languages across 40+ broadcast and cable channels, continues to grow in record numbers largely thanks to its digital streaming app, HotStar.
  • Hotstar continues to be one of the most-downloaded Android apps in the country, beating out Facebook Lite for the second year in a row, with more than 100 million active users – more than double the watch time of all its competitors combined. Engagement with the app has also more than doubled over the past two years, according to SimilarWeb. The priority there is to create as many hours of local programming as possible to drive engagement. 21st Century Fox CFO John Nallen says the company produces 17,000 hours per year of its local Indian product.
  • Cricket: The network scored a major win over Facebook two weeks ago by securing the global digital and broadcast rights to stream Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket for the next five years for a whopping $2.6 billion. Their mega-investment beat out a reported $600 million digital-only India subcontinent bid from Facebook, likely the largest sports distribution bid Facebook has made to date.
• Europe: 21st Century Fox is awaiting final approval from regulators to buy full stake in Sky, Europe's leading entertainment company serving 22 million network and satellite TV customers across the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria and Italy. If the takeover is approved, which Fox executives tell Axios they anticipate it will, it would be an enormous market share win for the Murdochs, who dropped Fox News from the air in the UK last month. The acquisition would also include Sky News, Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia, as well as the entire Sky communications brand, which includes broadband and digital content.
• Latin America: Fox Network Group, which controls Fox's TV and cable channels, has also been expanding its presence in Latin America and Asia. Fox Sports was granted broadcast rights to air Argentinian soccer this year. Fox Sports Latin America renewed its exclusive distribution deal with Concacaf, the group that controls soccer in North America, Central America and the Caribbean.
• Australia: The main video programming distributor in Australia, Foxtel, is controlled by Mudoch-owned NewsCorp, the only entertainment asset NewsCorp owns.

Why it matters: The future growth potential in entertainment and media is huge outside of the US market, which is why new entrants like Netflix and Facebook are so focused on international content and distribution deals. According Chip Smith, Executive VP of Public Affairs at 21st Century Fox, "Building global brands through deep localized investment is a cornerstone of our growth strategy, and we think the experience we've gained operating over decades in international markets will prove to be a unique differentiator for our business." Of note, James and Lachlan Murdoch, who now run the media empire, have lived and led media businesses on four different continents – something its tech competitors, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Reid Hastings of Netflix, can't claim.

The localized attention to markets is what the Murdochs are most-focused on when building their International brand:

• In India specifically, the push into free ad-supported streaming as opposed to a subscription-supported skinny bundle (something they are considering in the U.S. and Canada) stemmed from James Murdoch's personal experience running the company's Asia arm earlier in his career.
• In the U.K., the family's familiarity with the media market through years of cross-channel ownerships has reinforced their confidence in its Sky acquisition, despite regulatory delays.

• "No government regulator, and very few members of the media, understand how these mediums are being leveraged by campaigns," says Zac Moffatt, CEO of Targeted Victory, the advertising agency that managed the Romney campaign in 2012 and the Cruz campaign in 2016. "It seems like we're taking a knee jerk reaction that folks will feel better about in the short run and be totally inadequate for the complexities of the formats and targeting capabilities."
• "The problem with the FEC and potential regulation talk from members of Congress is that they aren't going far enough and it seems like they're taking a TV filter and applying it to ad spends on digital," says Chris Nolan, a veteran Democratic political ad executive and CEO of Spot-On agency, which places political ads for candidates across the country.
• "There's a wide disparity between digital FEC disclosures and traditional media. The digital side is nearly impossible to enforce, which is concerning," says Jordan Leiberman, Politics & Public Affairs Lead of Audience Partners, which manages dozens of political ad campaigns at the local and national levels.

Executives Axios spoke with say the industry needs to step up in order to ensure transparency, with some suggesting that publishers shouldn't be allow to accept digital programmatic (automated) ads — the types of ads big tech platforms almost exclusively sell. Some of the biggest news publishers, like The Washington Post, opt not to allow political ads to be sold programmatically, to avoid problems with ad acceptability and disclosures.

An optimistic note: "I personally am in favor of more transparency around targeting but think the first priority right now must be disclosing the source of political advertising," says Keegan Goudiss, a partner at Revolution Messaging, the political advertising firm that managed ad buying for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. "Tech companies have an opportunity to build a better version of the TV advertising political file on the FCC website."

By the numbers: Roughly $450 million was spent on Facebook during the 2016 general election and roughly $350 million on Google, according to data from Borrell Associates Inc. That number is only expected to increase as audiences migrate their attention to digital and mobile, specifically.

First it drove others out of business: Over the years, Toys 'R Us became the largest toy store in the United States with low prices that killed stylish independents like FAO Schwartz and Kay Bee Toys, both of which themselves filed for bankruptcy. But online competition from Amazon, in addition to discount pricing at stores like Walmart and Target, undercut the retailer. It also was severely hampered by more than $5 billion in debt on its balance sheet, related to the company's acquisition by private equity firms Bain Capital and KKR in 2005.