FTC files “the big one,” a lawsuit alleging Amazon illegally maintains monopoly::FTC: Amazon “extracts enormous monopoly rents from everyone within its reach.”
FTC files “the big one,” a lawsuit alleging Amazon illegally maintains monopoly::FTC: Amazon “extracts enormous monopoly rents from everyone within its reach.”
…can we just skip to the part where Amazon pays less than a fractional percent of their profit in fines and then proceeds with business as usual? I just feel like the charade has grown tiresome at this point.
You must’ve missed the part where Lina Khan built her entire career and reputation on an article she wrote for the Yale Law Journal as a law student arguing that Amazon should be split into separate companies and prevented from re-integrating.
She is considered a radical within the antitrust law world. She is vigorously opposed to vertically integrated monopolies of which Amazon is a star example. This case against Amazon is basically the final boss of her career and her legal movement, the New Brandeis Movement.
And then when this gets big it will be decided on by partison 90 year old idiots who will probably and up saying “amazon is 100% in the right on all counts, as damages to their reputation, amazon now owns the FTC” and then it is promptly found out that amazon paid them $10 million each with a comically large check in front of the courthouse at a press conference while taking photos and laughing “about those darned poor people” and the ruling will still stand.
Ah well, better not try then. Guess we just have to learn to like the taste of corporate boot.
Maybe some more wanking about some glorious revolution that will never happen will make that boot taste better.
Allow it to take its course.
“The lawsuit seeks declarations that Amazon’s conduct violates federal and state laws. It asks for an injunction prohibiting the conduct described in the lawsuit along with unspecified “structural relief” that would be “necessary to redress and prevent recurrence of Amazon’s violations of the law.” Structural relief could involve breaking up the company.”
Were you around in 1989 when Exxon basically destroyed Prince William Sound with an iceberged oil tanker through a comically evil set of circumstances including a possibly drunken captain, faulty equipment which languished for months, promised equipment that was never installed, and a total lack of planning for contingency? They dumped like 11 million gallons of oil and were assigned massive punitive damages of 5 billion bucks?
…and then it got appealed all the way to the supreme court, where it got busted down to 500 million spread over a time which actually allowed them to see profitability for causing one of the largest ecological disasters in history.
I don’t mean to sound jaded, and I truly appreciate your optimism. But the deck is no less stacked thirty years later and our political system is still bought and paid for. Let’s roll the dice and hope you come out on top of this one, friend. I’ll cheer alongside you.
I’m not necessarily optimistic about any outcome. I just don’t believe in shooting down something as potentially groundbreaking as this before it’s even started.