Kahn’s FTC Reportedly Reviving Price Discrimination Law to Investigate What Big Retailers Pay for Cola

Of course, Kahn has earned critics of her own, such as one commentary titled, “The Flawed Analysis Underlying Calls for Antitrust Reform: Revisiting Lina Kahn’s ‘Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,’” by Robert D. Atkinson and Michael R. Ward for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Kahn had argued that the failure to consider Amazon’s conduct as anticompetitive allowed it to become dominant across multiple lines of commerce and the way to make things right is to reform antitrust. “Unfortunately, a careful assessment of Amazon’s conduct does not support Kahn’s conclusion,” Atkinson and Ward wrote.

Perhaps even more unfortunately, the Atkinson-Ward critique is marred by a misplaced faith in the ability of markets to self-correct, special treatment for “platform” industries, and the narrow price-and-output perspective of the now-outdated Chicago school thinking of Bowman and Bork.