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In 2017, Lina Khan, a 27-year-old law student, attracted the kind of notoriety that can make or break a budding antitrust career when she claimed in one of the rare Yale Law Journal articles that went viral that one of the most successful in the United States. Tech companies had become so big and powerful that it was clearly “[marching] towards monopoly. Why, Khan wondered about Amazon, the e-commerce giant, was the US government not doing anything about it?
There was no shortage of laws or agencies designed to stop anti-competitive behavior, but no one seemed very concerned. What Khan concluded was that these agencies had redefined their thinking about monopoly: they were no longer concerned about overly large companies tying up entire industries and then using this control to colonize sectors of the economy. All they cared about was “consumer well-being,” which boasted efficiency and customer outcomes above all else.
Devised by a free-market legal theorist, Robert Bork, this became the dominant antitrust doctrine in the Reaganite 1980s, a time when giant, economy-spanning conglomerates seemed in terminal decline. But that was before the winner-take-all dynamic of the Internet revived these competition-crushing behemoths, few of whom cast a longer shadow than the monster Jeff Bezos built. In fact, if Khan perceived a parallel to Amazon’s status, it was that of Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller’s great hydrocarbon “octopus,” whose disintegration in 1911 marked the end of the era of the United States’ “robber baron.” Joined.
Six years after that Yale Law Journal article, Khan, then a young chairwoman of the US Federal Trade Commission, was able to put her thoughts into action and hit Amazon and Bezos with a lawsuit that could still end in their breakup. . . Dana Mattioli The war of everything is in part the gripping story of how Khan got there and eventually went after his own antitrust Great White Whale.
But Mattioli is also an active participant. There is an echo here of Ida Tarbell, the journalist whose revelations about Standard Oil’s monopolistic shenanigans led to the famous antitrust case more than a century ago. As Amazon correspondent for the Wall Street Journal (a publication whose existence says it all), Mattioli’s reporting focused on allegations of the company’s anti-competitive behavior, and it is the numerous eye-catching case studies that form the meat of the book.
A central concern is that the company plays so many potentially conflicting roles within the retail economy: it sells things like a retailer; acts as a showcase for others; and sells its own brand products. Some of the most surprising allegations involve claims that Amazon abuses these overlapping roles, for example by accessing sensitive business data about successful third-party sellers, then launching its own competing Amazon-branded products soon afterward. (It’s worth noting that a top Amazon executive has denied, under oath before Congress, that he would misuse such data to inform business decisions.)
However, when Mattioli obtained internal documents about a particular case and presented the evidence to the sellers, their reaction was revealing: In addition to being angry, they were afraid. “At the end of the day, [they] “They depended on Amazon for their paycheck, even if they had a love-hate relationship with the platform,” he writes.
The war of everything makes a compelling argument that no company should be that powerful. For many sellers, Amazon is now their primary route to market. Khan’s lawsuit argues that the company has taken advantage of this to force them to purchase other services such as advertising and fulfillment (in 2022, Amazon surpassed UPS to become the largest non-government delivery service in the United States). Increased by this influx, their share of sellers’ income rose from 19 percent in 2014 to 45 percent in 2023, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an antitrust group, which adds that prices had to rise to compensate for these. fee. A Borkian might argue that Amazon’s success is the reward for being efficient and increasing consumer welfare. But as there is less and less competition as a reference point, these notions of well-being become very difficult to measure.
Khan filed his lawsuit last September. Antitrust justice in the United States takes time, and it will be years before we know if he gets his whale… or goes down with it. Not everyone agrees with her legal interpretation, and some accuse her of overreaching. Amazon has changed some of its policies to make its contracts less onerous: for example, it no longer requires suppliers to post their lowest prices on Amazon. But Mattioli warns against seeking short-term behavioral remedies — the kind of deal struck in a huge antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft two decades ago. Bezos and his company are “driven by a competitive advantage that will stop at nothing: If you could own the world, be at home and everywhere, you would be.”
Mattioli’s prose is unadorned, and the list of cases can be overwhelming at times, but this is an important book on a topic that is perhaps more relevant now than at any time since 1911. With so many claims and counterclaims tacked into the text , it’s difficult You always have to be sure where the truth is, and the text is carefully peppered with Amazon’s denials. But claims of such importance should not be resolved through behind-the-scenes negotiations; They should be examined in public hearing.
The War of Everything: Amazon’s ruthless quest to own the world and remake corporate power by Dana Mattioli Torva £22/small, brown $32.50, 416 pages
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