Brain death at the FTC and FCC
Lina Khan, in her famous Yale Law School paper of half a decade ago, sketched an argument by which Amazon is bad, never mind what existing antitrust law and precedent say. Now that she’s head of Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission, all the fervor is gone. Her lawsuit last week was a bureaucratically listless and perfunctory invocation of existing law and precedent against the online retailer, eliciting not a modicum of enthusiasm even from the usual antitrust cheerleaders in the media.
Amazon controls a third of online sales and a single-digit share of all retail sales. Its business is smaller than Walmart’s. How does it become a monopoly? Only through the tired trick of inventing a new category, online superstore, which it can be accused of monopolizing.
Yet as not a single critic failed to point out, consumers don’t buy thousands of goods at a time. They buy one or a few. Because consumers have no trouble comparing prices at non-superstore retailers, even those specializing in a single product line, Amazon can’t usually get away with charging even a penny more than competing online retailers do.
Seeing how badly its argument was flying, the FTC then let out that Amazon had once used software to test if price hikes would stick. What business doesn’t? The need to test if price hikes stick again reveals only that Amazon is no monopolist. Between the lines what the lawsuit really lacked was the slightest indication that it was offered in good faith.
It wasn’t offered, say, to supply a Biden campaign anti-big-tech talking point while the precocious Ms. Khan increasingly focuses on acclimatizing herself to the perks and fawning attention that come to a Washington agency head. The universe obviously is trying to get our
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