Geoff Manne on the FTC’s Amazon Suit

ICLE President Geoffrey A. Manne was quoted in a column in Forbes about the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust suit against Amazon. You can read the full piece here.

Legal scholars differ on the antitrust prosecution of platforms. For example, a leading U.S. antitrust treatise writer, Professor Herbert Hovenkamp, generally supports the antitrust challenges to the platforms, seeing a need to restore competitive behavior (particularly in the case of Amazon and Facebook) or deal with “natural monopoly” concerns (Google). Stanford professor Douglas Melamed states that Google’s conduct “clearly has some legitimate benefits, and the question is how the courts are going to fit that into the overall analysis.” Howard University professor Andrew Gavil says that “[t]he allegations are definitely serious” in the 2020 case against Google, but “[w]hether the evidence will pan out is the big question.” Law and economics scholar Geoffrey Manne believes that the FTC’s suit against Amazon “will face an uphill battle before the courts.”