Сheaper, more effective manner than its competitors does not violate antitrust law. Yet, Sagers also mentions that Amazon’s purchase of a physical store like Whole Foods indeed shows its efforts to undercut retail in price competition and poses a unique threat to a competitive market. He thinks that Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods will make it hard for any online grocery store on Amazon Marketplace to succeed in the future, which would violate provisions that forbid mergers thwart technological or other developments that pose future competition.
To fundamentally evaluate how anti-competitive Amazon and its business conducts have been and to find a way out of the company’s problems, it is necessary to briefly revisit the basic essence of the U.S. antitrust law. Under the Sherman Act, any unreasonable restraint of trade, which is harmful to market competition should be forbidden. The Sherman Act does not intend to restrict business entities which succeed with their far superior products or better business strategies, but rather those intentionally hinder competition and develop a monopoly. The Clayton Act further restricts monopolistic behaviors like the use of price discrimination and forbids mergers and acquisitions which might function “substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly.”
Analyses have found that nearly one third of U.S. companies are in markets which are considered highly concentrated based on current antitrust standards and the U.S. economy needs more industrial competition, since two thirds of American industries have become more concentrated due to a wave of mergers since 1997. The ultimate way forward to address the antitrust issues even beyond Amazon is rigorous, broadly focused antitrust enforcement, which requires a comprehensive, macro approach. The approach does not necessarily view competition and consumer interests solely through the narrow lens of pricing, but rather judges in terms of its overall market and economic effects.
In the future, antitrust attorneys should fuse the sophisticated analysis of anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior advocated by Sagers with Khan’s understanding predatory pricing and platform economics to offer a way forward regarding the case of Amazon. While it might not be necessary or even effective to forcibly break up Amazon, competition is the basis of a thriving economy and it has been greatly weakened in the U.S. market nowadays. Corrective measures must be taken to make Amazon and other promising companies more wildly successful through vigorous market competition instead of monopolistic practices.
