Washington, D.C. has entered the battle against Big Tech with a new antitrust lawsuit against Amazon.
D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine filed the antitrust complaint against Amazon. The lawsuit alleged that “[c]ompetition and consumers were directly harmed” by Amazon’s “anticompetitive business practices.” It also alleged that Amazon’s practices actually raise prices for consumers: “Far from enabling consumers to obtain the best products at the lowest prices, Amazon instead causes prices across the entire online retail sales market to be artificially inflated, both for products sold on Amazon’s online retail sales platform and on its competitors’ online retail sales platforms.”
Racine asserted in the lawsuit that the higher prices decrease competition and harm consumers:
Competition and consumers were directly harmed by virtue of higher prices, as well as through the loss of choice, innovation, and competition among online retail sales platforms, as other online retail sales platforms were not able to use lower product prices to lure buyers and sellers to their competing online retail sales platform and capture some of Amazon’s dominant market share.
The lawsuit argued that Amazon makes competing against it very difficult by purportedly utilizing a tool called Fair pricing Policy. The tool “permits Amazon to impose sanctions on a [third-party seller] that offers a product for a lower price or on better terms on a competing online retail sales platform,” according to the suit. Amazon would force sellers out of its online marketplace if the seller dared to offer competitive pricing on different platforms, including their own website.
Amazon is far from the only Big Tech company facing an antitrust lawsuit. Forty-five states and territories have filed antitrust complaints against Google across two different lawsuits. A coalition of 48 states and territories have filed an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. “These companies are extremely powerful, extremely wealthy,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a call with the Media Research Center. “Unless we start addressing this very soon, we may lose our opportunity to address some of the wrongs.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
