We Need to Discuss Amazon.com (Premium)

You all know how strongly I feel about the long-overdue need to regulate Big Tech. And that Apple and Google are, to my mind, the worst offenders, the low-hanging fruit whose capricious anti-competitive strategies must be curtailed first. And that, more generally, that each of these Big Tech firms---Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta---should be closely analyzed by regulators around the world with the explicit goal of reigning in their anticompetitive and anti-consumer ways and ensuring that they conform to the rule of law and the best interests of the market.

And you may or may not agree with any of that. It doesn’t matter. That’s just where I am right now.

I bring that up because I am taking a stance contrary to at least some of these stated beliefs. And not entirely in the Devil’s advocate sense, as I see in this example some nuance that I do not see, say, in Apple’s extortionist App Store policies or in Google selling our personal information to advertisers. There is room for debate here, for sure. Perhaps even room to completely disagree with a process and some opinions that I might normally agree with wholeheartedly. And I am quite conflicted by this.

I am referring, of course, to Amazon.com being sued by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for abusing what it says are two monopolies owned by this online juggernaut.

I should preface this by admitting a certain bias against today’s FTC, which has lost the only two actions it has attempted against Big Tech so far, with Meta and Microsoft, and that I obviously have a major interest in the latter. And that I found the FTC’s arguments against Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard to be not just illogical but a complete fantasy. And that I was particularly delighted when the federal judge who oversaw the FTC/Microsoft hearings wrote in her ruling that the FTC had uncovered “no internal documents, emails, or chats contradicting Microsoft’s stated intent not to make Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox consoles. Despite the completion of extensive discovery in the FTC administrative proceeding, including the production of nearly 1 million documents and 30 depositions, the FTC has not identified a single document that contradicts Microsoft’s publicly stated commitment to make Call of Duty available on PlayStation (and Nintendo Switch).” This incredible condemnation of the FTC’s case lined up perfectly with my own beliefs in this matter, for sure.

My issue with the FTC, generally speaking, is that it is engaging in what I think of as a “closing the barn doors after the horses have already escaped” mentality in blindly going against anything that Big Tech is doing now rather than going after the biggest firms that are abusing their established monopolies the most. In other words, what the FTC should be doing is what the EU is doing: regulating Big Tech in a way that directly threatens their entrenched market abuses. It’s almost like th...