The F.T.C. Finally Takes On Amazon
Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, established her prominence as a legal scholar largely by critiquing Amazon’s sprawling business. In 2017, while she was still a student at Yale Law School, she published a paper titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which argued that the accepted paradigm for analyzing antitrust violations was outdated. In the nineteen-seventies, American antitrust enforcement increasingly prioritized the so-called “consumer welfare” standard, which centered on the idea that consumer prices were the most important factor in judging whether a firm was engaged in anticompetitive behavior.Khan’s argument against the dominance of the consumer-welfare standard rested on an analysis of the business practices of Amazon—which she called “the titan of twenty-fir...