Amazon.com Inc. and Lina Khan have a fraught history. Khan made her name as a law student in 2017 with an article in The Yale Law Journal that made an example of Amazon to argue for a broad re-imagining of U.S. antitrust law. Now she’s the chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which had already sanctioned Amazon for privacy lapses, sued the company for antitrust violations Tuesday after a multiyear investigation. Amazon’s place in the U.S. economy has only grown since Khan’s article was published, especially after so much consumer spending moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic. But much of U.S. antitrust law is more than a century old, written for a very different economy, making the FTC’s case an important test of whether Khan’s interpretation of the law will hold up in court.
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