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.
