The antitrust case against Prime

The dotted line to higher prices.

The starting gun on Big Tech trustbusting was fired in 2017, when Lina Khan, then a law student (now an FTC trustbuster!) published “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” a law-review article showing how Amazon formed a monopoly without legal trouble.

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

The key was a Reagan-era shift in antitrust policy, based on the theories of the Nixonite criminal Robert Bork. Bork held that the only time we should fight monopolies is when they inflicted “consumer welfare” harms, by driving up prices.

That meant that monopolies that made prices go down — by abusing their workers and suppliers, rather than their customers — were safe from antitrust enforcement. Borkism was hugely popular with wealthy people, who bankrolled its global expansion.

Every president since Reagan has embraced and furthered the “consumer welfare” doctrine, which meant that when Amazon tapped into the capital markets for billions, it was able to safely offer prices below their wholesale cost, using investor cash for subsidies.

Then, after it had extinguished all its competitors, it could end its subsidy and switch it to its suppliers — forcing them to cut their margins and wages to unsustainable…