Amazon got its start in 1994 when a relatively young Jeff Bezos moved to Seattle and launched Amazon.com from a corner in his garage. For years the site was nothing more than an online boutique bookstore. But Amazon bet big that online shopping would one day be just as popular as shopping in malls and invested heavily in making that a reality. In fact, Amazon did not post a profit until five years after it first launched as it continued to reinvest revenue and innovate. Largely as a result of its investment strategy and commitment to low prices, convenience, and customer satisfaction, Amazon now sells over 12 million products across different markets and competes against the nation’s largest retailers, including Walmart, Target, and Home Depot. A significant majority of American households now have an Amazon Prime membership and hundreds of thousands of third-party sellers use Amazon and its distribution capabilities to sell their own products and services across the country and world. Even so, Amazon continues to lag well behind Walmart, which enjoys nearly twice the sales revenue.In recent years Amazon and the outsized benefits it creates for consumers have come under attack as “Big Tech” becomes a favorite punching bag for politicians and pundits alike. The emergence of this newfound hostility for the major digital platforms threatens to undermine the innovation that has occurred over the past several decades as a result of the United States’ light-touch approach to tech regulation.Perhaps not surprisingly, much of the recent scrutiny against Amazon is the result of its substantial growth since its founding and efforts by corporate competitors who are seeing their dominance decline. To many critics from all sides, it is “too big.” And they see antitrust as a weapon to bring it down to size (what size, they never say). Just recently the House Judiciary Committee released an antitrust report (the Report) attacking Amazon and calling for aggressive enforcement aimed at, among other things, breaking it up.But the Report, along with many of the other recent criticisms levied against Amazon, ignores or downplays inconvenient facts, including all the benefits Americans receive from Amazon and its online marketplace. The Report also ignores the devastating effect that aggressive antitrust enforcement can have on the broader economy. And although it claims to be a “deep dive” into digital markets, it’s riddled with factual mistakes, loaded rhetoric, and baseless accusations. Even worse, it proposes drastic changes to the country’s antitrust laws to protect corporate competitors, not American consumers. Some policymakers and advocates would prefer antitrust law follow a “big is bad” subjective approach. Under this regime, large businesses like Amazon would be far more susceptible to antitrust litigation solely because their size itself would indicate unlawful behavior.This approach, however, would harm both consumers and society by raising higher prices, lowering the quality of goods and services, and stifling innovation overall. It would also further politicize antitrust enforcement and open the door for misuse of the law by large corporations to advance their own interests and harm their competitors
