Talk about anticlimactic. We’ve been expecting today’s Federal Trade Commission antitrust lawsuit against Amazon since the day commission chair Lina Khan was sworn into office in June 2021. After all, she rose to antitrust fame with her 2017 Yale Law Journal paper arguing that modern competition policy wasn’t equipped to deal with the threat Amazon posed. Yet despite the plentiful time for preparation, what we got today was a 172-page complaint that contained little that was surprising. It drew heavily on news accounts about Amazon’s allegedly unfair business practices. To be fair, there seems to be some juicy stuff in the complaint—for example, references to an apparently nefarious pricing system called Project Nessie—but that material was almost entirely blacked out. In fact, so much of the complaint is redacted that it’s like a novel that has every third page torn out.
Still, there’s enough unredacted material to see that the FTC makes a reasonable argument that certain Amazon practices are problematic, particularly the agency’s allegation that the e-commerce giant punishes merchants who sell on its platform for discounting on other websites. That’s something we and other media outlets have written about, particularly as it relates to competitors like Singapore’s Shein. It’s ironic that Khan makes this particular allegation, though, given that in her Yale paper she complained about Amazon’s willingness to cut prices as a way of gaining market share. Still, the lawsuit echoes much of that paper, particularly about the power Amazon gains by serving as a platform other businesses depend on. (Amazon, for its part, said the lawsuit could lead to higher prices for consumers.)
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