The swamp (FTC) is suing Amazon (apex predator)
Amazon Is the Apex Predator of Our Platform Era
By Cory Doctorow
Mr. Doctorow is the author, most recently, of “The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.”
“Speaking for his landmark antitrust bill of 1890, Senator John Sherman said: “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.”
This suspicion of corporate power died in the Reagan era, when regulators adopted a new posture grounded in the idea that monopolies were evidence of efficiency and should be nurtured, and that “consumer welfare” in the form of low prices was an absolute good of antitrust law. Amazon is surely the king of our time. Our antitrust laws were fashioned specifically to guard against this overwhelming corporate power — both its accumulation and its abuse.
This is something Ms. Khan, the F.T.C. chair, understands better than almost anyone: As a law student, she published “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” in The Yale Law Journal in 2017. That article launched her career as an antitrust theorist, culminating in her elevation to the trade commission just four years later. Ironically, Ms. Khan’s deep expertise on Amazon and past criticism prompted the company to seek her recusalfrom antitrust investigations.
Ms. Khan has taken aim at some of the largest tech companies the world has ever seen. Sometimes, she loses. The F.T.C. failed to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard and Meta’s acquisition of Within. Ms. Khan’s detractors then smear her with claims of gamesmanship and insincerity. But she is engaged in the honorable and necessary business of restoring the enforcement program of the federal government. She seeks to reinvigorate the use of the longstanding — and long-dormant — powers she already has.
The best time to have fought this power was over the past quarter-century, as Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, used his shareholders’ capital on predatory pricing campaigns, seemingly in plain violation of the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, and on a string of anticompetitive acquisitions that surely violated the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914.”