As the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sets its sights on challenging Amazon’s dominance in online retail and cloud computing, the agency must leverage its most potent weapon against anticompetitive behavior: Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. In a new article in The Sling, ILSR’s Ron Knox details how Section 5 is a crucial provision that empowers the FTC to punish and prevent the abusive conduct of monopolists. In recent decades, however, the agency has underutilized this statute. Recognizing the urgent need to reclaim its core mission of fostering fairness in the economy, the FTC has signaled its intent to reinvigorate the enforcement of Section 5, aligning with Congress’s original intent.
“At some point soon, the Federal Trade Commission is very likely to sue Amazon over the many ways the e-commerce giant abuses its power over online retail, cloud computing and beyond. If and when it does, the agency would be wise to lean hard on the useful and powerful law at the core of its anti-monopoly authority.
The agency’s animating statute, the Federal Trade Commission Act and its crucial Section 5, bans “unfair methods of competition,” a phrase Congress deliberately crafted, and the Supreme Court has interpreted, to give the agency broad powers beyond the traditional antitrust laws to punish and prevent the unfair, anticompetitive conduct of monopolists and those companies that seek to monopolize industries.
Section 5 is what makes the FTC the FTC. Yet the agency hasn’t used its most powerful statute to its fullest capability for years. Today, with the world’s most powerful monopolist fully in the commission’s sights, the time for the FTC to re-embrace its core mission of ensuring fairness in the economy is now.
The FTC appears to agree. Last year, the agency issued fresh guidance for how and why it will enforce its core anti-monopoly law, and the 16-page document read like a promise to once again step up and enforce the law against corporate abuse just as Congress had intended.”
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