Amazon Goes On Offense Against Antitrust

Lina Khan has put the fear of God into Amazon. While they have been playing defense with certain messaging, they also moved into offense recently by adding their own website to message directly to sellers about potential legislation.

Fear and $$$ is the primary motivator behind their website messaging:

• "Jeopardize our ability operate a marketplace" (fear)

• Hundreds of thousands of small businesses losing access to Amazon's services (fear)

• Which would hurt your revenue ($$)

• and hurt consumers access to selection and lower prices ($$)

Merchants can sign up to hear more from Amazon about this. This messaging is a little disingenuous, but I'm sure it feels accurate from Amazon's point of view.

If the legislation happens, no one, including Amazon, knows what the remedy could be. In other antitrust cases in the past companies and services were regionalized or broken up, and no one actually lost access to services. In the short term, prices could go up and or down, depending on how benevolent the monopolist was.

But over time, the new competition created could spur new innovation.

Bottom line, I don't trust Congress to be able to act on anything in a united fashion (or function at all) unless there is some kind of existential crystallizing event.