Shocking: FTC Tries Doing Its Job, Investigates Amazon Acquisitions
The FTC has scrutinized numerous Amazon purchases and launched antitrust probes into the company’s operations since Lina Khan took charge of the agency.
Excerpt:
The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Amazon’s plans to acquire two companies: vacuum maker iRobot and healthcare company One Medical. The Wall Street Journal reported that on Friday, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing by One Medical’s owner, 1Life, revealed the FTC requested additional information about the deal from One Medical and Amazon.
These are just the latest of Amazon’s acquisitions to fall under FTC scrutiny. Earlier this year, the FTC sought to review the acquisition of MGM Studios on grounds it could be anticompetitive. Though the deal closed in March, the FTC warned it could still block the deal.
In August, Amazon filed a complaint with the FTC about an ongoing antitrust probe of its Prime subscription program, claiming it has become “unduly burdensome.” Last year in June, Amazon begged the FTC to recuse Chairwoman Lina Khan from antitrust investigations into the company, citing her legal scholarship as bias that might prevent an “open mind” to its pro-monopoly arguments.
Comment: Not content with its enormous monopsony power, Amazon is also seeking monopoly power as well. Both i-Robot’s roomba and the One Medical operation also would vastly increase Amazon’s control of Big Data it can mine for all its other retail and production operations. [Wikipedia defines monopsony as: In economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. The microeconomic theory of monopsony assumes a single entity to have market power over all sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service. This is a similar power to that of a monopolist, which can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, where multiple buyers have only one seller of a good or service available to purchase from.]