As the US government accuses Big Tech companies of monopolising the most valuable areas of the internet, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a long-awaited antitrust complaint against Amazon.com on Tuesday and urged the court to consider ordering the online retailer to sell assets.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charged that Amazon, which was founded in a garage in 1994 and is now worth $1.3 trillion, has resisted efforts by vendors on its online marketplace to provide goods at lower prices on other platforms. According to the FTC, Amazon increases expenses for buyers and sellers by requiring vendors to use its warehouses and shipping services.

The FTC claims that Amazon is a monopoly that abuses its power and quotes a merchant as saying: “We have nowhere else to go and Amazon knows it.”

After years of warnings that Amazon.com and other computer firms were using their dominance of search, social networking, and online retailing to become gatekeepers on the most lucrative portions of the internet, the lawsuit was anticipated.

One of the few points of agreement between Democrats and Republicans has been the need to take action against Big Tech, and the FTC chairman has expressed particular alarm about Amazon’s influence.

Following a four-year investigation and federal lawsuits brought against Alphabet’s Google and Meta Platforms’ Facebook, 17 state solicitors general joined the complaint.

According to the FTC, it has asked the court to impose a permanent injunction requiring Amazon to cease its illegal actions. Amazon’s headquarters are in Seattle, where the complaint was filed in federal court.

“Left unchecked, Amazon will continue its illegal course of conduct to maintain its monopoly power,” the FTC said in its complaint which asked the court “to put an end to Amazon’s illegal course of conduct, pry loose Amazon’s monopolistic control, deny Amazon the fruits of its unlawful practices, and restore the lost promise of competition.”

The court was urged by the FTC complaint to take into account “any preliminary or permanent equitable relief, including but not limited to structural relief, necessary to restore fair competition.”

In antitrust lingo, “structural relief” typically refers to a company selling an asset, such as a portion of its business.

When questioned about the possibility of splitting up Amazon at a news conference, FTC Chair Lina Khan declined to comment. “At this point, liability is really the focus,” she said.

In other antitrust trials, the court first determines whether the corporation broke the law before discussing, if necessary, how to fix it.

According to Amazon, the FTC case was misguided and would harm consumers by forcing up costs and slowing down deliveries.

“The practices the FTC is challenging have helped to spur competition and innovation across the retail industry, and have produced greater selection, lower prices, and faster delivery speeds for Amazon customers and greater opportunity for the many businesses that sell in Amazon’s store,” said David Zapolsky, Amazon’s general counsel. In a blog post, the company noted that it had 500,000 independent sellers on the platform.

Prior to the announcement of the lawsuit, shares of Amazon were down 3.2%. In late afternoon trade, they were down 4%. The case resulted in gains for some investors.

“Either way, the shareholders win. If FTC loses its status quo, if company breaks up, the sum of the parts is greater than the whole as the AWS (cloud) business will command a very high multiple. Analysts will figure this out soon, but for now it’s ‘shoot first, ask questions later,'” said Thomas Hayes, chair at Great Hill Capital.

According to the FTC, Amazon penalised suppliers who attempted to offer pricing that were less expensive than those of Amazon by making it challenging for customers to locate the seller on Amazon’s platform.

Amazon is accused of favouring its own products on its platforms over those of rivals, among other things.

John Coughenour, a judge who was appointed in 1981 by Republican President Ronald Reagan, was given the case, which was brought in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Khan claimed that Amazon had employed unethical strategies to thwart businesses that might have developed to challenge its monopoly.

“Amazon is now exploiting that monopoly power to harm its customers, both the tens of millions of families that shop on Amazon’s platform and the hundreds of thousands of sellers that use Amazon to reach them,” she said.

For “The Yale Law Journal,” Khan wrote an article analysing Amazon’s dominance in online commerce while he was still a law student. Khan also served on the staff of the House committee that wrote a report that recommended limiting the power of four digital giants: Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook.

Critics of Amazon applauded the case.

“No corporation has ever centralized this much power across so many crucial sectors. Left unchecked, Amazon’s power to dictate and control threatens the rule of law and our ability to maintain open, democratically governed markets,” said Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which has pushed for the government to act against Amazon.

The Justice Department and FTC launched investigations into Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon during the Trump administration, which ended in 2021.

Under Republican President Donald Trump, the Justice Department sued Google for its search business; under Democratic President Joe Biden, the suit was for advertising technology. During the Trump administration, the FTC filed a complaint against Facebook, and Biden’s FTC is continuing the case.

(Adapted from ThePrint.in)