The Federal Commerce Fee underneath chair Lina Khan is gearing as much as file a “far-reaching” antitrust lawsuit towards Amazon, in keeping with a brand new Bloomberg report.
The FTC is predicted to file the swimsuit within the coming weeks, which sources inform Bloomberg will allege the tech large pressures on-line retailers to make use of its in-house logistics service by rewarding those that do use it and punishing those that do not.
Information of the potential FTC swimsuit comes simply two weeks earlier than Amazon Prime Day, with third-party retailers utilizing its market additionally in a position to faucet into the Prime Day gross sales.
Khan has been an outspoken advocate for antitrust enforcement of Large Tech since her appointment as FTC chair in mid-2021. As she outlined in her imaginative and prescient for the company’s client safety mission, the FTC could be taking “a holistic strategy to figuring out harms” that attacked root causes of company behaviors that negatively impacted customers.
Regardless of Amazon accusing Khan of bias for publishing a widely-cited essay concerning the tech firm and antitrust whereas at Yale Regulation College, she has guided the company to file a number of client safety lawsuits towards Amazon since assuming her function on the FTC.
In its client safety capability, Khan’s FTC has additionally scrutinized Amazon’s acquisitions and mergers, like when it sought to purchase Roomba robotic vacuum maker iRobot for $1.7 billion final September — a deal that also hasn’t cleared regulators. Most just lately, the company sued Amazon for signing clients up for Prime memberships with out their consent, with Khan elaborating in a tweet that the corporate deliberately obstructed customers from canceling.
Neither the FTC nor Amazon have responded to a request for remark by time of publication.
