Amazon antitrust lawsuit likely to be long and arduous journey for FTC
Amazon is heading into one of its biggest sales events of the year — Prime Day — with a lawsuit hanging over its head that accuses it of preventing sellers from hawking their merchandise at lower prices on other sites. The Federal Trade Commission's long-awaited antitrust case is the agency's most aggressive move yet to tame the market power of Amazon, a company that's become synonymous with online shopping and fast deliveries.
Under chair Lina Khan, the agency hasn't been shy about taking big swings against some of America's biggest companies and testing the limits of competition law to reverse what many of her supporters see as decades of weak antitrust enforcement.
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The Amazon case, which was backed by 17 states, marks a full-circle moment for Khan, who is finally confronting the company she scrutinised in an influential scholarly paper she penned as a Yale Law student.
In the paper, which was called «Amazon's Antitrust Paradox» and released in 2017, Khan argued the prevailing way of looking at anti-competitive conduct by the impact it has on prices was insufficient in the modern economy.
