Racine has made this claim a centerpiece of his lawsuit. Amazon has said before that merchants have absolute authority to set prices for the products they sell on its site, but that ignores that the company has subtle levers to make merchants’ products all but invisible to shoppers. If a merchant lists a product for less on another site, Amazon can respond by making it more cumbersome for a shopper to buy the item.
Amazon, in a statement to my colleagues, said that merchants have the freedom to list and price their products however they wish, but that Amazon can chose “not to highlight” products that are not competitively priced.
Why is the attorney general’s claim a big deal?
Legal experts have said that it’s tricky to sue technology giants for breaking antitrust laws. That’s partly because of the ways U.S. competition laws have been written, interpreted and enforced over the decades. But the lawsuit against Amazon bypasses this by saying that the tech giant hurts the public the same way that 19th-century railroads and steel giants did — by strong-arming competition and raising prices at will.
Last year, the legal scholar and Big Tech critic Tim Wu told me that he believed that those price claims were the strongest potential antitrust case against Amazon on legal grounds. (He has since been picked to advise the White House on corporate competition issues.)
I don’t know if any of these lawsuits against Big Tech will succeed at chipping away at the companies’ tremendous influence. And I can’t definitively say whether we’re better or worse off by having a handful of powerful technology companies that make products used and often loved by billions of people.