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This week, the Federal Trade Commission effectively declared war

on one of the biggest companies in the world.

The FTC expected to file that year's long investigation into Amazon's online marketplace.

There's highly anticipated loss who claims the retail giant has an illegal monopoly.

Just because Amazon is great and in many ways wonderful and convenient doesn't mean Amazon

can break the law. 30th general from Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, and

along with 17 states, the FTC accused Amazon of using its monopoly to choke competitors

and harm consumers. We'll note that Amazon is among NPR's financial supporters

and pays to distribute some of our content, but we cover it like any other company.

Amazon's conduct causes online shoppers to face artificially high prices even when

they're shopping somewhere other than Amazon.

FTC Cherlina Khan has been a driving force behind this case, and she's had Amazon in her sites

for years. As a Yale law student back in 2017, Con wrote a paper arguing that antitrust laws had

failed to keep Amazon in check. That academic paper went viral. She wrote that it was as if

Jeff Bezos had charted the company's growth by drawing a map of antitrust laws and then

devising routes to smoothly bypass them in her words. Ryan Tracy is a tech policy reporter for

the Wall Street Journal. The argument was that antitrust had started to focus kind of

myopically in her view on low consumer prices, which are obviously a good thing, but her argument was

...