FTC Chair Lina Khan’s lawsuit is not about breaking up Amazon at the moment

Amazon is Not Just the Real Thing — It’s Just What the FTC Needs to Fix It: Amazon’s CEO, John Bezos, Does Your Innovation Really Matter

Mr. Bezos, 59, is no longer in charge of Amazon on a day-to-day basis. He surrendered the chief executive reins to Andy Jassy two years ago. But make no mistake: Mr. Bezos is Amazon’s executive chair and owns more of the company than anyone else. It is his innovations, carried out over more than 20 years, that Ms. Khan is challenging. He was quoted several times in the F.T.C. complaint.

If Ms. Khan is able to convince people, the competitive landscape for tech companies will be vastly different. The effect of big antitrust cases is that they increase. The government had a hard time in their pursuit of Microsoft. 1,000 start-ups were allowed to bloom, including Amazon, because that still had enough force to distract and weaken the software empire.

Silicon Valley spent the summer transfixed by the prospect of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg literally fighting each other, despite the odds of this actually happening being near zero. Ms. Khan and Mr. Bezos are, however, the real thing — a courtroom clash that could have implications far beyond Amazon’s 1.5 million employees, 300 million customers and $1.3 trillion valuation.

After writing a scholarly article in which she compared Amazon to oil barons and railroad monopolies more than a century ago, Lina Khan rose to prominence in law school. She’s now the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, which is essentially the government’s watchdog for corporations.

In a blog post, Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky called the lawsuit “wrong on the facts and the law.” “Competition and innovation across the retail industry have been stimulated because of the practices the FTC is challenging,” he said.

Khan said the complaint was focused on establishing liability. Any relief needs to stop the illegal tactics and restore competition.

Khan toldNPR that half of the revenue from Amazon goes to the company. She said the FTC’s lawsuit was about changing that.

“You can basically disappear from Amazon’s storefront if you put a lower price somewhere else,” Khan told NPR. “Given the significant shopper traffic on Amazon, if Amazon makes you disappear from the storefront, that can be quite fatal for your business.”

According to Amazon’s numbers, roughly 60% of items purchased on Amazon are sold by third-party sellers. Many sellers say Amazon is so dominant in online retail that it’s hard to sell anywhere else — so they stay there despite high fees.