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FTC Readies Lawsuit That Could Break Up Amazon 62

The Federal Trade Commission is finalizing its long-awaited antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, POLITICO reported Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter, a move that could ultimately break up parts of the company. From the report: The FTC has been investigating the company on a number of fronts, and the coming case would be one of the most aggressive and high-profile moves in the Biden administration's rocky effort to tame the power of tech giants. The wide-ranging lawsuit is expected as soon as August, and will likely challenge a host of Amazon's business practices, said the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss a confidential matter. If successful, it could lead to a court-ordered restructuring of the $1.3 trillion empire and define the legacy of FTC Chair Lina Khan.

Khan rose to prominence as a Big Tech skeptic with a 2017 academic paper specifically identifying Amazon as a modern monopolist needing to be reined in. Because any case will likely take years to wind through the courts, the final result will rest with her successors. The exact details of the final lawsuit are not known, and changes to the final complaint are expected until the eleventh hour. But personnel throughout the agency, including Khan herself, have homed in on several of Amazon's business practices, said some of the people.
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FTC Readies Lawsuit That Could Break Up Amazon

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  • by damicatz ( 711271 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @07:52PM (#63714748)

    How many cases has Lina Kahn lost in a row now?

  • Amazon will offer a couple millions to any FTC employee that says "let's not". Not directly, obviously.

    Then, they will lobby against anti-trust laws.

    We do not wait until the cancer becomes comparable in weight to the host before we decide to do something about it.

    Amazon has a higher "total assets" metric than each of bp, chevron, shell or exxonmobil. Can you imagine the backlash from trying to break up exxonmobil?

    I am not an economist, I am using that metric as a rough proxy of a company's size, inertia.

  • ...when it comes to Google's search business or Microsoft's office suite and its closed but changing file formats.

    These folks really think we're fools, right?

    • Who says they're looking away? If you had three targets, each of which would require almost the entire resources of your agency, would you choose to take them all on at once? Would you choose the one engaging in the most egregious practices? Would you choose the one you could make the best case against?

      I can't believe you seriously expect a single government agency to tackle three monopolies, each with more resources than entire countries, all at once.

      • The problem is that you shouldn't need to fight resources with resources - they are either in violation of the law or not.

        This should be determined by a small limited group of people/lawyers from both sides, it shouldn't take 5000 lawyers and 5000 government employees to figure this out. The fact that it does tells us that government has gotten too bloated, corporations too powerful, and lawyers - well - they're lawyers what do you expect other than more lawyers.
        • it's that law is complicated. It has to be. If you try to make law simple you either end up with a law that is arbitrarily enforced or you end up with one that has so many loopholes you could kill a man and get away with it.

          The real world is a complicated place with lots of asterisks and exceptions.
          • I get that, but the problem is that one exception should not become baked into the law such that now everyone is trying to exploit it. The problem with law is that we have completely gone the opposite of the KISS principal.

            Every single encountered exception should be up to a jury or judge and not baked into the law. Yes I realize that citing precedents are a thing but they have gotten out of hand.
  • by Slashythenkilly ( 7027842 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @08:52PM (#63714826)
    Heil Hydra
  • He even admitted he'd knowingly broke the law.

    Yadda yadda yadda, nothing bad happened to Microsoft, Gates got off scott-free, and Gates money flowed like a steady stream to the benefit of those with connections to the political class, and that continues to this day.

    Prediction: The parasitical offspring of those with connections will get to wet their beaks from minor tributaries flowing from the circulatory system of Amazon.

    • What you've described is America functioning as designed.
    • Ultimately what saved Bill Gates was that "technically" anyone could enter the OS market. You can look at Unix and Linux even during that time. I am not saying his suppressive efforts weren't illegal, but if you could survive the API lawsuits you "could" do it.

      I think it may be the same with Amazon if I am being honest. All they are is a warehouse company that uses a catalog to ship stuff to your door. Granted they own the shipping company for the last mile but they are not competing with other shipping

      • by Firethorn ( 177587 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @10:05AM (#63715946) Homepage Journal

        You also had Microsoft and Intel propping up Apple at times, so it wouldn't go bankrupt, and keep that important 5-10% or so of market share so they could argue that no, Microsoft isn't a monopoly. For that matter, Intel propped up AMD back in the day for the same reasons.

        The question of "how do you split them up"? Is a good one. It's the time of the internet, "regional" isn't as big of a factor anymore. Part of the attraction of Amazon is that I can buy all sorts of things - from books to cookware to welders to computers, etc... If I want to buy something that can be shipped, odds are I can buy it off of amazon. Without having to put my credit card details into yet another site, without having to input my shipping addresses again, etc...

        The problem, I think, is that Amazon isn't truly a monopoly for anything.
        Storefront: Competition is still there in the form of manufacturer websites, specialty websites like newegg*, more general sites like ebay, alibaba, etc...
        AWS: Google and such.
        Self driving car: Zoox, apparently, but you also have all the major car companies, google, etc... Uber shut their attempt down after a fatal accident, and are now working with Waymo/google.
        Streaming: Netflix, Disney, youtube, etc...

        I mean, I'd love to investigate them, google, and apple for price fixing on ebooks. They're the reason why you can't buy gobs of older books published years ago in ebook form for under a buck, but something closer to hardcover prices, not even paperback. It's also the only reason why I don't have an extensive ebook library outside of baen(which has fallen tremendously since Mr. Baen died). In short, the higher prices might mean more profit per book, but I've spent drastically less money on ebooks if they were what I'd consider a "fair" price. So they've lost a lot of profit from people like me.

        There's certainly practices that I'd love to have investigated and them fined over. There's some shit with them acting as competition with companies also listing/selling on amazon. Improper customer service, but as far as I'm aware, it's still relatively easy to find a human at Amazon, unlike Google, who'll do things like ban their own developers without explanation.

        *I'll buy stuff off of newegg just for the superior interface in finding what I'm looking for.

      • by hawk ( 1151 )

        >Ultimately what saved Bill Gates was that "technically" anyone could enter the OS market.

        no, that was just their argument. Economics and antitrust law has long recognized "barriers to entry" in a field that may nominally be open to entrants.

        What *actually* saved Microsoft from being split was the judge, in defiance of judicial ethics, shooting off his mouth about a still on-going case, leaving the appellate court no choice in light of his clear bias but to vacate .

        hawk, economist & lawyer

  • Amazon can afford enough lawyers to bankrupt the DOJ's budget just doing delaying tactics.

  • That will be a very interesting case. Last june, a podcast from the NYT (The Daily, "Is Washington Finally Ready to Take On Big Tech?") reported that the FTC has an interesting strategy: it is ready to loose. I quote: "So the FTC isn’t setting out to lose cases. But Lina Khan and her allies believe that in order to win in the long term by shifting the law back in this direction that they think hearkens back to kind of the golden era of trust busting in America, that you have to be willing to lose, tha
  • Do not make the good the enemy of the crappy! It is a Danger to Democracy (tm) to have low prices and cheap fast shipping. Higher prices now! Slow shipping now!

  • Amazon has been doing some scummy stuff, from the no-zero-stars to letting companies rip people off. Amazon is a monopoly, face it folks.
  • Does anyone honestly believe any government could possibly force Amazon to do anything they don't want to?
  • ... get my next order in before I have to go back to shopping at Sears... no, wait...

If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts. -- Albert Einstein

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