Open Markets & Amazon: Our Years of Work to Address Amazon's Monopoly Abuse
The Open Markets Institute has worked for years to raise policymaker and public awareness of how Amazon’s abuse of its monopoly power endangers American innovation, small businesses, good wages and working conditions, and the free flow of ideas critical to a healthy democracy. And how to stop it.
The below is a timeline of Open Markets’ actions and scholarship on Amazon’s monopoly power (in reverse chronological order):
September 2023: Open Markets legal director Sandeep Vaheesan and chief economist Brian Callaci again call on the FTC to use its unfair methods of competition authority to regulate Amazon’s control of independent trucking companies.
August 2023: Open Markets and UK/EU partners SOMO and the Balanced Economy Project urge the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to reject Amazon’s weak commitments to change its illegal Marketplace practices in response to the UK’s investigation.
August 2023: Open Markets partners with the Authors Guild and the American Booksellers Association to call on the Justice Department and the FTC to open an investigation into how Amazon uses unfair methods of competition to maintain its dominance over the book market.
February 2023: Open Markets legal director Sandeep Vaheesan pens an op-ed in The New Republic: “The Shadow Empire That Fuels Amazon’s Dominance” regarding Amazon abusive grip over its delivery partners.
“With federal antitrust action against Amazon rumored to be coming soon, trustbusters and the public should recognize that merely breaking up the corporation will not be sufficient. Reining in Amazon requires challenging its domination through contracts and surveillance—the tools through which it has supercharged its awesome power.”
February 2023: Open Markets and European partners Foxglove, SOMO and the Balanced Economy Project urge the European Commission to investigate Amazon’s planned takeover of iRobot, with a focus on the personal data Amazon will gain access to as a result.
January 2023: Open Markets files an amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Amazon.com Inc in support of the District’s appeal, backing up their case that Amazon uses its monopoly power to prohibit sellers and suppliers from offering better prices on their very own sites and rival platforms.
November 2022: Open Markets calls the Department of Justice’s successfully blocking Penguin Random House from purchasing Simon & Schuster, “a huge step toward an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon for its disruptive, antidemocractic, and politically dangerous monopolization of America’s market for books,” and urges publishers and lawmakers to turn their sights on Amazon’s books monopoly.
November, 2022: Open Markets chief economist Brian Callaci calls on Senator Schumer to bring the American Innovation and Choice Online Act to the Senate floor for a vote.
September 2022: Open Markets legal director Sandeep Vaheesan and chief economist Brian Callaci call on the FTC to use its unfair methods of competition authority to regulate Amazon’s control of independent trucking companies.
March 2022: Open Markets chief economist Brian Callaci highlights the roots of Amazon’s unsafe warehouse business model in neoliberal deregulation.
February 2022: Open Markets legal director Sandeep Vaheesan and chief economist Brian Callaci argue that reviving enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act would challenge Amazon’s abuse of sellers and suppliers.
September 2021: Open Markets updates its earlier report on Amazon surveillance revealing “major escalations” of Amazon’s invasive worker surveillance, with an enormous impact on workers of color in particular.
September 2021: Open Markets chief economist Brian Callaci calls out Amazon’s antitrust harms to workers in testimony to the House Antitrust Subcommittee.
September 2021: In an op-ed in The American Prospect, Open Markets chief economist Brian Callaci argues that judicial reinterpretations of antitrust law facilitated the rise of sham entrepreneurship “opportunities” like Amazon’s captive trucking company network.
July 2021: Open Markets objects to and warns about Amazon's acquisition of One Medical and the company’s new ability to scoop of Americans’ private health data like never before.
July 2021: Open Markets signs a letter urging the FTC to stop corporate surveillance, citing Amazon’s practices.
September 2020: Open Markets publishes an important new report: “Eyes Everywhere: Amazon's Surveillance Infrastructure and Revitalizing Worker Power,” which includes a blueprint for how to stop Amazon’s invasive, harmful, union-busting worker surveillance.
August 2020: Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn publishes a cover article in Harper’s, describing the extortionary and autocratic nature of the business models of Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
July 2020: Open Markets’ Sandeep Vaheesan publishes “Imagining a Democratic Amazon” in Democracy Journal.
July 2020: Open Markets food program manager, Claire Kelloway, wrote for The American Prospect about the problems with the fact that Amazon and Walmart are the only retailers approved to accept online SNAP purchases in 85% of states.
April 2020: Open Markets sends a letter to the Antitrust Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives laying out how to address platform monopolists.
March 2020: Open Markets testifies to the Antitrust Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate about Amazon’s illegal self-dealing.
February 2020: Open Markets describes the political dangers posed by Amazon in a PBS Frontline report, “Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos.”
November 2018: Open Markets calls for an investigation of Amazon’s bait-and-switch over HQ2.
June 2018: Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn delivers a keynote speech, “The World Is Waiting for Labour to Break the Digital Monopoly,” invoking Amazon, at the UNI Global International meeting, before the two biggest international labor organizations in Europe.
April 2018: Lina Khan, a former Open Markets staff member, spoke with NPR's Korva Coleman about how Amazon could face regulation.
2017-18: Open Markets helps establish Athena, a pro-worker, Amazon-critical coalition of working people. Athena was the first worker alliance since the 1930s to focus on the political dangers of monopoly.
November 2017: Open Markets hosts Sen. Al Franken for his historic remarks calling for America’s common carrier rules to apply to Amazon, Google, Facebook, and other platforms.
June 2017: Then-Open Markets fellow, Matt Stoller, publishes an op-ed in HuffPost: “America’s Amazon Problem”
June 2017: Then-Open Markets staff member Lina Khan, sounds the alarm against Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods in the New York Times.
January 2017: Former Open Markets staff member, Lina Khan, publishes her Yale Law Review article “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” as detailed in this New York Times profile. Khan based much of this report on her work concerning Amazon’s monopoly power during her time at Open Markets, where she worked from July 2011 to June 2014.
June 2016: Open Markets hosts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s groundbreaking speech on “America’s Monopoly Problem.” At the event, Pulitzer Prize-winning author TJ Stiles detailed Amazon’s threat to democracy.
January 2016: Open Markets hosts the first policy discussion in Washington on Amazon’s danger to free expression, at the New America Foundation, where Open Markets was then based. “Amazon’s Book Monopoly. A Threat to Freedom of Expression?”
July 2015: Open Markets, Authors United, and the American Booksellers Association wrote jointly to William Baer, then head of the Antitrust Division at the DOJ, urging him to investigate Amazon for antitrust violations in the books market:
“Amazon has used its dominance in ways that we believe harm the interests of America’s readers, impoverish the book industry as a whole, damage the careers of (and generate fear among) many authors, and impede the free flow of ideas in our society.” A lead business article in the New York Times covered their letter.
April 2012: Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn publishes an article in Slate on the Apple e-book decision, condemning the DOJ for siding with Amazon over book publishers. Lynn’s writing helped to shape subsequent coverage of the issue and the ongoing debate about Amazon’s power.
February 2012: Open Markets publishes the first attack on Amazon’s power in a mainstream publication, in the article “Killing the Competition” in Harper’s. In this piece, Barry Lynn draws from the example of how Amazon cut off MacMillian’s ebook sales on its platform to intimidate the publisher into complying with Amazon price-setting.
Early 2010: Open Markets provides pro bono advice about Amazon’s power and actions to top book publishers as they prepared to make a formal complaint to the Department of Justice.
February 2010: Open Markets hosts a panel discussion about Amazon’s threat to authors and readers, at the American Booksellers Association’s winter meeting with top editors.
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