The FTC Lawsuit Against Amazon Is the Biggest Antitrust Fight of Our Time (2024)

The Federal Trade Commission’s monopoly lawsuit against Amazon—the public, largely unredacted version was finally released last week—is the country’s most consequential antitrust case in a generation, at least. The FTC’s action hits at the heart of how Amazon grows and maintains its dominance of online retail—in which it spins the taxes and tolls it forces on third-party sellers into vast profits that help fund the rest of the Amazon monopoly machine. If the lawsuit succeeds, it will almost surely mean lower prices and more options for online shoppers and sellers. It may also transform a company used by most Americans in a way that will democratize the online retail market and deliver real options and innovation to an increasingly crucial industry. At the moment, the lawsuit’s potential feels like the breakup of AT&T in the 1980s—a decision that unlocked fundamental changes to the way we work and communicate with each other.

The lawsuit is also a strike against Amazon’s broader power. While the case focuses on the abuse of Amazon sellers and shoppers, there’s a tacit understanding that Amazon is an exploitation machine built to extract money, labor, and ideas from everything and everyone it touches, from the undignified conditions it forces upon its laborers, to its partnership with police to surveil our homes and neighborhoods. The lawsuit can help break down that power, too, shrinking Amazon’s ability, for example, to exploit its captured warehouse workforce or use its unlimited resources to sway governments to submit to its will. It’s a bold attempt to quash Amazon’s private power—an action with both democratic intent and a fundamentally democratic origin.

Indeed, the genesis of this case happened far outside the halls of the FTC. The government’s most powerful regulator’s declaration of war on the country’s most pernicious monopoly did not happen in a vacuum. The movement to break up Amazon got to this point because an army of workers, grassroots activists, small-business owners, scholars, and policymakers have come to understand Amazon’s unfettered monopoly stranglehold, and also to realize that only through their collective power can that stranglehold be broken. If the FTC does dismantle Amazon’s e-commerce monopoly, a budding, widespread movement will carry that victory on its shoulders.

The growing movement to challenge Amazon is so widespread because Amazon’s abuses are felt so acutely across the country. Logistics is one key example. Amazon’s warehousing and shipping operation has undergone mind-bending expansion over the past five years; it now employs more than three-quarters of a million workers, and operates 1,300 logistics facilities around the country—all built on the back of its monopoly online retail business, in which sellers are strong-armed into using and paying for Amazon’s storage and shipping. Talk to any delivery driver for any logistics firm and they’ll speak of the “Amazonification” of their jobs—the breakneck pace of the work, the surveillance, the suffocating heat of the summer months. Alongside its monopoly-fueled growth, Amazon’s toxic treatment of its logistics workers has spread like cancer through the industry.

In most every community and every corner of the economy where Amazon’s monopoly has inflicted pain, people, organizations and entire communities have come to understand that Amazon’s ability to abuse and extract comes from its power—and that only by fighting back, individually and collectively, can they succeed in breaking that power. Labor movements have risen to challenge Amazon’s notoriously bad working conditions. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters believes breaking Amazon’s grip on the logistics industry would mean better outcomes for workers, both within the union and throughout the workforce. Even when it secured one of the strongest union contracts in history with UPS over the summer, the Teamster’s ultimate, long-term goal of organizing Amazon—a company they call “enemy no. 1”—simmered in the background. Meanwhile, workers in Southern California, Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, Missouri, and elsewhere are organizing shops, worker petitions. and solidarity rallies with striking autoworkers and nurses.

And Amazon’s incursions have fueled local fights well beyond the shop floor. Communities and grassroots organizers have battled to keep Amazon’s invasive logistics infrastructure from polluting the air they breathe. Cohorts of small businesses have resisted Amazon’s power to nickel and dime them with fees and decide their success or failure and organized against its predatory fees. Likewise, small delivery firms are fighting to break Amazon’s unfair control over how they pay and treat their drivers. Democratic actions to take back power from Amazon continue to grow and spread. It feels like a movement taking shape.

Collectively, this movement against Amazon’s power has coalesced in Athena, a big-tent coalition made up of organizations in the labor, racial justice, environmental justice, privacy rights, and small-business communities, collectivizing and amplifying their ability to overturn Amazon’s autocratic dominance. As Athena organizer Sasha Hammad and Liberation in a Generation senior policy director Azza Altiraifi recently wrote, “A leftist vision and practice of antimonopoly aims to dismantle the oppressive social and economic systems that give rise to concentrated corporate power in the first place.” That’s the bigger vision for the movement: changing the structure of our economy by harnessing democracy against monopoly rule.