Brain Death at the FTC and FCC

Net neutrality and Amazon show why Congress needs to kill agencies as well as creating new ones.

Lina Khan, in her famous Yale Law School paper of half a decade ago, sketched an argument by which Amazon
is bad, never mind what existing antitrust law and precedent say. Now that she’s head of Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission, all the fervor is gone. Her lawsuit last week was a bureaucratically listless and perfunctory invocation of existing law and precedent against the online retailer, eliciting not a modicum of enthusiasm even from the usual antitrust cheerleaders in the media.

Amazon controls a third of online sales and a single-digit share of all retail sales. Its business is smaller than Walmart
’s. How does it become a monopoly? Only through the tired trick of inventing a new category, online superstore…

Seeing how badly its argument was flying, the FTC then let out that Amazon had once used software to test if price hikes would stick. What business doesn’t? The need to test if price hikes will stick again reveals only that Amazon is no monopolist.

Between the lines what the lawsuit really lacked was the slightest indication that it was offered in good faith. It wasn’t offered, say, merely to supply a Biden campaign anti-big-tech talking point…

The same week saw her counterpart at the Federal Communications Commission, Jessica Rosenworcel, commit a similar act of null interventionism, restarting a pointless fight over net neutrality.

In its Obama heyday net neutrality was a rulemaking in search of a justification and even more so now that ubiquitous high-speed broadband has eliminated whatever incentive might have existed for internet service providers to slow traffic selectively or attempt (mostly mythically) to charge popular websites for a “fast lane.”

But listen closely: Washington activist cliques are practically wetting themselves not because Ms. Rosenworcel’s proposal would serve any useful purpose. They just want to have an expensive and highly abstruse fight, the seventh in 25 years by one expert count, over the legal limits of FCC internet regulation.

Maybe this kind of bureaucratic zombieism is all we can expect from our elites as they await the 2024 election, with its turning-over-the-chessboard-again potential.

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