The Federal Trade Commission’s chair, Lina Khan, has brought her long-awaited, audacious case against Amazon, signaling the Biden administration’s determination to restore an approach to competition law that has been in decline since the Carter administration.
But Amazon is precisely the kind of company that Congress had in mind in enacting America’s many antitrust laws.
The robber barons of that era hijacked the economy and politics, but they also faced the constraints of empires grounded in physical goods.
Today’s tech barons at huge platforms like Amazon, Google and Meta can deploy anticompetitive, deceptive and unfair tactics with the agility and speed of a digital system.
And Amazon is the apex predator of our platform era.
Persons:
Lina Khan, Carter
Organizations:
Federal Trade, Google, Amazon