Longtime Amazon critic Lina Khan is trying to stop the retailer

by David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan’s years-long effort to challenge the power of Amazon.com reached a turning point on Tuesday when her agency filed a wide-ranging antitrust lawsuit against the online retailer.

In 2017, Khan wrote an influential academic article arguing that the company’s structure and practices raised anticompetitive concerns and had escaped antitrust scrutiny.

“With its missionary zeal for consumers, Amazon has marched toward monopoly, singing the tune of modern antitrust law,” Khan, then 29, wrote in the Yale Law Journal. Amazon “avoided government scrutiny, in part, by fervently dedicating its business strategy and rhetoric to lowering prices for consumers.”

Six years later, Khan, who became FTC chairman in 2021, is at the forefront of antitrust charges brought by the online retailer’s agency. On Tuesday, the FTC asked a judge to “end Amazon’s illegal conduct, deprive Amazon of monopoly control, deprive Amazon of the fruits of its illegal practices, and restore the lost promise of competition.”

Khan said Tuesday that Amazon “has used a suite of punitive and coercive tactics to unlawfully maintain its monopolies.” She alleged that the company “uses its monopoly power to enrich itself while raising prices and devaluing services for tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform.”

Amazon has struggled for years.

In 2021, the retail giant filed a petition asking for Khan to be fired from her position over Amazon-related matters, claiming that she “has repeatedly called for the breakup of Amazon throughout her career.” On Tuesday, it dismissed an antitrust lawsuit, saying Amazon has helped spur competition and innovation in the retail industry.

Under Khan, the FTC has taken an aggressive stance against Amazon, accusing it of signing up millions of consumers to its paid Amazon Prime service without their consent and making it difficult for them to opt out.

On May 31, the FTC announced a $5.8 million settlement with Amazon’s Ring doorbell camera after the agency found that the cameras were used to spy on some customers. Amazon also agreed in May to pay $25 million to settle FTC allegations that it violated children’s privacy rights by failing to delete recordings of its virtual assistant Alexa.

Long before she joined the FTC, Khan was an influential critic of Big Tech. As a staffer on the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel, Khan helped write an extensive report on abuses of market dominance by Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms’ Facebook and Alphabet’s Google.

Since her 2017 article, Amazon’s market capitalization has more than doubled to $1.35 trillion, and its revenue has increased from $177 billion to $434 billion last year. Since 2010, the company has invested more than $530 billion in the United States and currently employs 1.54 million people.

But Khan has powerful supporters. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has supported Khan for years, praised the lawsuit on Tuesday, saying it was “a poster child for the massive concentration of ownership in sector after sector that lines shareholders’ pockets and forces Americans to pay higher prices.”

(Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington Editing by Matthew Lewis)