The Everything War — taking on Amazon’s march to monopoly

In 2017, a 27-year-old law student, Lina Khan, attracted the sort of notoriety that can make or break a budding antitrust career when she claimed in one of the rare Yale Law Journal articles to go viral that one of America’s most successful tech companies had grown so big and powerful that it was clearly “[marching] toward monopoly”. Why, Khan wondered of Amazon, the ecommerce giant, wasn’t the US government doing anything about it?

There was no shortage of laws or agencies designed to stop anti-competitive behaviour, yet no one seemed hugely bothered. What Khan concluded was that these agencies had redefined the way they thought about monopoly: they no longer worried about overlarge companies tying up entire industries and then using this control to colonise swaths of the economy. All they cared about was “consumer welfare”, which vaunted efficiency and customer outcomes over everything else.

Devised by a free-market legal theorist, Robert Bork, this became the dominant antitrust doctrine in the Reaganite 1980s, a time when giant economy-spanning conglomerates seemed in terminal decline. But that was before the internet’s winner-takes-all dynamic revived these competition-squashing behemoths, of which few cast a longer shadow than the monster Jeff Bezos built. Indeed, if there was a parallel Khan perceived to Amazon’s status, it was that of Standard Oil, John D Rockefeller’s great hydrocarbon “octopus”, whose 1911 break-up signalled the end of America’s “robber baron” age.

Fast forward six years from that Yale Law Journal article and Khan, by then a very youthful chair of America’s Federal Trade Commission, was able to put her thoughts into action and hit Amazon and Bezos with a lawsuit that could yet end in its break-up. Dana Mattioli’s The Everything War is partly the gripping story of how Khan got there, finally hunting down her own antitrust Great White Whale.

But Mattioli is also an active participant. There’s an echo here of Ida Tarbell, the journalist whose revelations about Standard Oil’s monopolistic chicanery led to the famous antitrust case over a century ago. As the Wall Street Journal’s Amazon correspondent (a post whose very existence speaks volumes), Mattioli’s reporting came to focus on allegations of the company’s anti-competitive behaviour, and it is the many eye-stretching case studies that are the meat of the book.

A central concern is that the company performs so many potentially conflicting roles within the retail economy: it sells stuff like a retailer; acts as a shopfront for others; and sells its own branded goods. Some of the most startling allegations involve claims about Amazon abusing these overlapping roles, for instance accessing sensitive commercial data on successful third-party sellers, only then to launch its own Amazon-branded competing goods shortly afterwards. (It is worth noting that a senior Amazon executive has denied under oath to Congress that it would misuse such data to inform business decisions.)

Yet when Mattioli obtained internal documents about one particular case and presented the sellers with the evidence, their reaction was telling: as well as being angry, they were fearful. “At the end of the day, [they] relied on Amazon for their paycheck, even if they had a love-hate relationship with the platform,” she writes.

The Everything War makes a compelling case that no company should be this powerful. For many sellers, Amazon is now their main route to market. Khan’s lawsuit argues that the company has leveraged this to force them to buy other services such as advertising and fulfilment (in 2022, Amazon surpassed UPS to become America’s biggest non-governmental delivery service). Swelled by this influx, its take of sellers’ revenues rose from 19 per cent in 2014 to 45 per cent in 2023, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an anti-monopoly group, which adds that prices had to go up to offset these fees. A Borkian might argue that Amazon’s success is the reward for being efficient and raising consumer welfare. But with less and less competition providing a benchmark, these notions of welfare become very hard to gauge.

Khan launched her lawsuit last September. US antitrust justice takes time, and it will be years before we know whether she gets her whale — or goes down with it. Not everyone agrees with her legal interpretation, and some accuse her of over-reach. Amazon has changed some of its policies to make its contracts less onerous: for instance, it no longer requires vendors to post their lowest prices on Amazon. But Mattioli cautions against reaching for behavioural remedies that fall short of break-up — the sort of deal that was cut in a big Microsoft antitrust suit two decades ago. Bezos and his company are “driven by a competitive edge that would stop at nothing — if it could own the world, and be in your home, and be everywhere, it would.”

Mattioli’s prose is unadorned, and the roll call of cases can overwhelm at times, but this is an important book about a topic that is perhaps more relevant now than at any time since 1911. With so many claims and counterclaims studding the text, it’s hard always to be sure quite where the truth lies, and the text is punctiliously peppered with Amazon denials. But claims of such moment shouldn’t be settled by backstairs negotiation; they should be tested in open court.

The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power by Dana Mattioli Torva £22/Little, Brown $32.50, 416 pages

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