It can’t get much worse than partnering with a Chinese Communist Party-controlled firm with questionable labor practices to attack an American-founded company that significantly lowers prices for working families.
Yet that’s exactly what the Biden administration’s departing Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair Lina Khan did on her way out the door. It makes sense she’d collude with another foreign government, given she already did that with European regulators (drawing the ire of Congress) in the name of crushing American competitiveness.
This is the latest salvo in the 2023 lawsuit the FTC filed against Amazon claiming that it engages in unfair anti-competitive business practices.
Nick Pope gives the latest background in The Daily Caller involving the Chinese online marketplace firm Temu:
The Biden Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reportedly communicated with a major Chinese e-commerce company about Amazon’s pricing policies that are related to the FTC’s case against Amazon, according to The Information, citing two people familiar with the matter.
FTC personnel reportedly sent a letter to Temu and also spoke with representatives of the company between December 2024 and Inauguration Day, according to The Information and Daniel J. Gilman, a former FTC attorney advisor and current senior scholar for the International Center for Law and Economics. Amazon’s pricing practices are at the center of a Biden FTC antitrust case against the company, which alleges Amazon pricing practices limit consumer choice to the disadvantage of competitors, and that company policy disadvantages third-party sellers using their infrastructure.
Gilman writes in Truth on the Market, “It’s a dubious case, and new FTC leadership ought to take a good hard look at the details, and at the question of whether this specific antitrust case is a sensible way to deploy FTC resources.”
Khan’s work against Amazon seeks to punish the online retailer for delivering better service and arrays of goods at lower prices to customers. As a reminder, the consumer welfare standard is the framework that has guided antitrust law and enforcement for decades until Khan came along. This standard measures anticompetitive behavior based on increased prices and reduced production, not the other way around. Khan’s campaign to overturn the consumer welfare standard has pushed the interest of consumers out of the way in pursuit of other goals and—in the case of Amazon—personal vendettas. Gilman outlines Khan’s arbitrary, biased, and erratic approach to whack Amazon while letting Costco, Wal-Mart, and Target skate free.
“Last April, my ICLE colleague Brian Albrecht and I polled economists who work on antitrust issues for the Yale Journal of Regulation’s ‘Notice and Comment’ blog about the blitz of anti-tech actions launched by federal enforcers during the Biden administration … polls consistently ranked the FTC’s Amazon antitrust case as the worst of a strained lot. This latest wrinkle certainly doesn’t make the case any stronger.”
The FTC’s new chair, Andrew Ferguson, replaces Khan and will have to clean up her mess. As Khan slams the door on her way out, Khan’s legacy is littered with numerous, embarrassing court case losses and, as the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability found, a sweeping destruction of agency norms. Americans deserve better.