Khan’s FTC Reportedly Reviving Price Discrimination Law to Investigate What Big Retailers Pay for Cola
Khan wrote in her Note that Yale Law economist Ward Bowman and controversial Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, author of The Antitrust Paradox in 1978, influenced government enforcement to deprioritize Robinson-Patman and the related predatory pricing doctrine. Khan opined that the decline in FTC-initiated Robinson-Patman Act cases reflected the belief of these writers that these cases were of little economic concern, noting that Bork’s appointment as Solicitor General “gave him a prime platform to influence the Supreme Court on antitrust issues and enabled him ‘to train and influence many of the attorneys who would argue before the Supreme Court for the next generation.’”
Of course, Khan has earned critics of her own, such as one commentary titled, “The Flawed Analysis Underlying Calls for Antitrust Reform: Revisiting Lina Khan’s ‘Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,’” by Robert D. Atkinson and Michael R. Ward for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Khan 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 Khan’s conclusion,” Atkinson and Ward wrote.
