THE AMAZON ANTITRUST LAWSUIT IS LIKELY TO BE A LONG AND ARDUOUS JOURNEY FOR THE FTC

Amazon is heading into one of its biggest sales events of the year - Prime Day - with a lawsuit hanging over its head that accuses it of preventing sellers from hawking their merchandise at lower prices on other sites.

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The Federal Trade Commission's long-awaited antitrust case is the agency's most aggressive move yet to tame the market power of Amazon, a company that's become synonymous with online shopping and fast deliveries.

Under chair Lina Khan, the agency hasn't been shy about taking big swings against some of America's biggest companies and testing the limits of competition law to reverse what many of her supporters see as decades of weak antitrust enforcement. But that approach has also led to some high-profile setbacks, most notably in the FTC's bid to block Microsoft's takeover of Activision Blizzard and Meta's acquisition of the virtual reality startup Within Unlimited. The FTC is appealing the judge's ruling in the Microsoft case.

The Amazon case, which was backed by 17 states, marks a full-circle moment for Khan, who is finally confronting the company she scrutinized in an influential scholarly paper she penned as a Yale Law student. In the paper, which was called "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" and released in 2017, Khan argued the prevailing way of looking at anticompetitive conduct by the impact it has on prices was insufficient in the modern economy. Instead, she pushed for a more progressive approach that examines how corporate concentration impacts the broader market.

Two years ago, Khan was tapped to lead the FTC by President Joe Biden, whose administration has taken a tougher stance on antitrust enforcement. That same year, Amazon unsuccessfully sought to get her recused from agency probes against the company, arguing she was too biased.

Now, her agency must prove in court both that Amazon is a monopoly and is using its dominance to prevent competition from flourishing in the marketplace.