One day after filing a massive antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan defended the agency’s decision to pursue the company and explained how its use of monopoly power allowed it to leverage an effective 50% tax on sellers.
In an interview Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Khan said that the lawsuit is “fundamentally about protecting free and fair competition” and denied suggestions that the FTC is interested in punishing large companies for their success.
The lawsuit marks a major milestone for Khan’s FTC and has been long anticipated, given Khan’s own rise to prominence came from her 2017 Yale Law Journal note “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” That article detailed Khan’s view of how the prevailing approach to antitrust enforcement at the time failed to account for the vast scale and network effects present in digital markets.
I wonder who Amazon managed to tick off.
Amazon’s monopoly has been defended by the government up to recently, particularly in the field of ebooks.
Certainly not defending Amazon, but I’m wondering what the full story is.
Somebody didn’t get their kickback.