Lina Khan's Amazon Paper and the Revival of Anti-Monopoly Thinking

Law reviews are not where revolutions usually start. Each year, student editors at the major schools publish a handful of notes written by their classmates, carefully footnoted pieces that are read mainly by other law students and the occasional judge's clerk. In January 2017, the Yale Law Journal published one of them under the title "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox." Its author, Lina Khan, was a third-year law student who had spent several years before law school working at a think tank on corporate concentration. The title was a deliberate echo of a 1978 book by Robert Bork, the conservative legal scholar, that had helped reshape American antitrust law around a single idea. Khan's note argued that the idea had failed, and used the most beloved company in American retail to prove it. Within a few years, the note had become one of the most discussed legal articles of its era, and its author was running the Federal Trade Commission.

In short: Lina Khan's 2017 note argued that antitrust law's narrow focus on short-term consumer prices had blinded it to the power of companies like Amazon. The argument helped revive an older tradition of anti-monopoly thinking that drew support from both left and right. Her time leading the FTC brought big cases and big losses, and the ideas have outlasted her tenure.

The idea she was arguing against

To understand why a student note made such a splash, you need to know what it was arguing with.

For much of the twentieth century, American antitrust law cared about the structure of markets. Big companies with dominant positions were suspect in themselves, and the law aimed to protect small producers, independent businesses and a decentralized economy, not just low prices. Louis Brandeis, who wrote about the dangers of bigness before he joined the Supreme Court, was a guiding figure for this tradition.

Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, a group of economists and lawyers associated with the University of Chicago argued that this approach was muddled and often harmful. Bork's book, "The Antitrust Paradox," made the case that the only legitimate goal of antitrust law was consumer welfare, which in practice came to mean low prices and high output. A big company that delivered low prices was, under this view, doing exactly what markets should do. Courts and enforcers of both parties gradually adopted this framework. By the 1990s it was simply how antitrust worked.

The approach had real virtues. It gave courts a measurable standard. It stopped the government from attacking companies merely for being large. It protected consumers from cartels and price-fixing. Its defenders still make those points, and they are fair ones.

What it lost was harder to see. Workers whose wages were held down by a dominant local employer did not show up in a consumer price test. Neither did farmers selling to a handful of meatpackers, small manufacturers dependent on one giant retailer, or the startups that never got funded because investors assumed an incumbent would crush them. The standard had a clear view of the checkout line and a blurry one of everything behind it.

What the note said about Amazon

Khan's argument was that the consumer welfare standard, as practiced, could not see the kind of power Amazon had.

Amazon was famous for low prices and for being willing to lose money for years to grow. Under the price-focused standard, that looked like pure benefit to consumers. Khan argued it was also a strategy. A company that investors allowed to sacrifice profits indefinitely could price below cost to drive out rivals, then build a position so central that everyone else depended on it. Her note pointed to Amazon's aggressive pricing of e-books and its long-running campaign against Diapers.com, whose parent company Amazon later bought.

The more lasting part of the argument was about structure. Amazon was not just a store. It ran a marketplace on which independent sellers depended, its logistics network delivered for those sellers, and it also sold its own products in competition with them. That dual role gave Amazon access to data about rivals' sales and the power to set the terms on which they reached customers. Khan argued that a company in that position has both the incentive and the ability to favor itself, and that a focus on today's price for the consumer misses the harm to sellers, to future competition and to the economy's resilience.

Her proposed answers were drawn from older traditions: stronger rules against predatory pricing, closer scrutiny of vertical integration, and, for dominant platforms, the kinds of obligations once applied to railroads and utilities, such as nondiscrimination rules or separation of the platform from businesses that compete on it.

How a student paper spread

The note's influence came partly from timing. By 2017, unease about the largest technology companies was growing across politics, and a generation of younger lawyers, economists and journalists was looking for a vocabulary to describe what was wrong. The note provided one, and it reached far beyond law schools through press coverage and debate. Critics gave the movement a nickname meant to sting, calling it hipster antitrust. Supporters preferred to describe it as a return to the original purpose of the antitrust laws.

Khan followed the note with work that put her inside institutions. She worked as a legal fellow at the FTC in the office of Commissioner Rohit Chopra, then as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee's antitrust subcommittee, led by Representative David Cicilline, during its investigation of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. That investigation produced a long report in October 2020 concluding that each company held significant market power and recommending reforms, including structural separation of dominant platforms. The investigation drew support from some Republicans, notably Representative Ken Buck of Colorado, a conservative who became one of the most vocal critics of Big Tech's power.

Running the FTC

In 2021, President Biden nominated Khan to the Federal Trade Commission. The Senate confirmed her on June 15, 2021, by a vote of 69 to 28, with substantial Republican support, and the president designated her chair the same day. She was 32, the youngest person ever to lead the agency.

Her tenure was ambitious, combative and mixed in its results. Here is a fair accounting.

The big cases. In September 2023 the FTC and a group of states sued Amazon, alleging that it illegally maintained monopoly power by punishing sellers who offered lower prices elsewhere and by pushing them to use its fulfillment services. That case was still moving through federal court in Seattle when she left. A separate FTC case accused Amazon of tricking customers into Prime subscriptions and making them hard to cancel; in September 2025, after she had departed, Amazon agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle it, one of the largest consumer-protection settlements in the agency's history. Her FTC also continued the monopoly case against Meta, which a judge rejected in November 2025.

The rules. Khan's FTC wrote rules aimed directly at ordinary workers and consumers. In April 2024 it adopted a rule banning most noncompete agreements, which bind tens of millions of workers. A federal judge in Texas set the rule aside in August 2024, and in 2025, under new leadership, the FTC abandoned its appeal. The agency also adopted a click-to-cancel rule requiring companies to make subscriptions as easy to cancel as to sign up for; a federal appeals court vacated it in July 2025 on procedural grounds.

The mergers. The FTC and Justice Department issued new merger guidelines in December 2023 that took a stricter view of deals by dominant firms. The FTC challenged several large mergers, winning some and losing others in court.

Critics, including many in the business community and some Democrats, argued she picked fights she could not win and alienated potential allies. Supporters argued that losing some cases is the price of testing the boundaries of the law, and that her FTC changed the expectations of corporate boards about which deals regulators would let through.

Why the right took notice

One of the most striking things about the anti-monopoly revival is who else signed on.

A strand of the populist right came to share much of its diagnosis. Several Republican senators and members of Congress argued that the largest technology companies were too powerful, politically and economically, and some praised Khan's work openly. JD Vance, then a senator from Ohio, was among the Republicans who said publicly that she was doing a good job. When Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, his FTC chair, Andrew Ferguson, kept several of the major tech cases going, including Meta and Amazon.

The overlap is not total. Conservatives tend to frame the problem as Big Tech's power over speech and culture; progressives tend to frame it as power over workers, small businesses and prices. Conservative enforcers have also used the FTC's tools in ways progressives find troubling. And in 2026 the Supreme Court decided, in Trump v. Slaughter, that the for-cause protection shielding FTC commissioners from removal is unconstitutional, so the president can now fire commissioners at will. That makes the agency's independence, which anti-monopoly advocates once took for granted, a question for every future administration.

Still, the shift in the debate is real. Ideas that were outside the mainstream in 2016 are now common ground in both parties: that some companies are too dominant, that the price consumers pay today is not the only measure of harm, and that concentration affects democracy.

Where the Chicago critique still lands

Fairness requires saying where the old school's objections still bite.

The consumer welfare standard was a response to real problems: inconsistent rulings, cases that protected inefficient firms from competitors and enforcement that sometimes raised prices for ordinary people. Anti-monopoly enforcers must show that their approach produces clearer rules, not just more cases. They must also show that remedies like breakups and nondiscrimination rules can be administered well. And they need to be honest that some of their biggest efforts have lost in court, which suggests either that judges are wedded to the old standard or that the cases were not as strong as advocates believed, or both.

My view is that the revival is right on the main point. Markets work for people only when power within them is checked, and price is not the only way power hurts. But the movement's success will depend less on brilliant notes than on patient, winnable cases and on laws Congress actually passes.

Why predatory pricing was nearly impossible to prove

One part of the note took aim at a specific legal doctrine, and it is worth understanding because it shows how the old framework worked in practice.

Predatory pricing means selling below cost to drive rivals out, then raising prices once they are gone. For decades, many economists in the Chicago tradition argued that it was rare and irrational: a company would lose money for certain while the payoff was uncertain, since new rivals could enter once prices rose. The Supreme Court absorbed that skepticism. In a 1993 case, Brooke Group v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco, it held that a plaintiff must show not only that prices were below an appropriate measure of cost, but also that the company had a dangerous probability of recouping its losses later by charging more. That recoupment requirement made predatory pricing cases extremely hard to win.

Khan argued that this test fits poorly with companies like Amazon. A firm whose investors reward growth over profit can lose money for years. And the payoff need not come from raising the price of the same product. It can come from dominance across many lines of business, from the fees charged to sellers who have no other way to reach customers, or from data gathered along the way. A test that looks only for later price increases on the same goods may miss all of that.

Her critics in the academy pushed back hard. Some argued that the note mistook aggressive competition for predation and that Amazon's low prices were simply good for shoppers. Others said her proposals would make courts less predictable and invite the government to protect inefficient rivals. Several prominent antitrust scholars wrote formal responses. That debate is part of the note's legacy too: it forced defenders of the old standard to restate why they held it, and some conceded that enforcement had grown too timid, even as they rejected her remedies.

What you can do

A student paper changed a national debate. Ordinary citizens can push it further. Some places to start:

• Comment when competition rules are proposed. Rules on mergers, noncompetes and unfair practices go through public comment. Our comment tracker lists the federal rules open now, closing soonest first and grouped by issue, with advice on writing a comment regulators can use.
• Ask your representatives where they stand. Find your House member and senators by address and ask whether they support stronger merger rules and a ban on dominant platforms favoring their own products.
• See who in Congress pushes on monopoly power. The Progressive Caucus page covers the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Democratic leaders, many of whom have backed anti-monopoly bills.
• Read the wider story. Our page on corporate power collects reporting on concentration, mergers and the people challenging it.

At bottom, the note asked its readers to reconsider what antitrust is for. That reconsideration is now in courts, agencies and campaigns, and it belongs to anyone willing to take part.