The agency is seeking a permanent injunction to « pry loose Amazon’s monopolistic control to restore competition. »
Federal Trade Commissioner Lina Khan is finally entering the ring with Amazon, her oldest antitrust nemesis. The agency, along with 17 other state attorneys general, is officially suing Jezz Bezos’s e-commerce baby for growing and metastasizing into a trillion-dollar anti-competitive monopoly, allegedly at the expense of consumers and sellers.
On Tuesday, the FTC and the attorneys general filed the historic lawsuit, which accuses the e-commerce giant of using “interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies” to maintain an illegal monopoly. The landmark 172- page suit, filed in Western Washington district court, claims Amazon leveraged its monopoly power to simultaneously raise prices for consumers and crush would-be competitors. Today’s complaint builds off of a years-long investigation into Amazon’s business practices and marks one of the most significant legal challenges to the company since its founding three decades ago.
“We’re bringing this case because Amazon’s illegal conduct has stifled competition across a huge swath of the online economy,” FTC Bureau of Competition Deputy Director John Newman said in a statement. “Amazon is a monopolist that uses its power to hike prices on American shoppers and charge sky-high fees on hundreds of thousands of online sellers.”
The complaint focuses on alleged anticompetitive practices in two distinct areas, the market that serves online consumers and the market for online marketplace service for sellers. Both consumers and sellers are being harmed, the suit alleges, all for the benefit of Amazon. Attorneys general from New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Main, Maryland, Massachusets, and Michigan were amongst those who singed onto to the complaint.
