The government sues Amazon, as its Google case gets stuck behind closed doors

Three years ago, a House of Representatives subcommittee on antitrust released a four-hundred-plus-page report that detailed the allegedly anticompetitive practices of the four major digital platforms—Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta (then known as Facebook)—and called on the Department of Justice to take action. A few weeks later, the government did exactly that, filing a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Google

Observers have compared the Google lawsuit and the 1998 case against Microsoft on various substantive grounds.

Google isn’t the only current target of the Biden administration’s antitrust regulators: last week, the FTC and seventeen states filed a similar case against Amazon, alleging that the company uses anticompetitive tactics in order to preserve its market power and profit margins. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the suit alleges that an Amazon algorithm called Project Nessie monitored the prices of goods across the Web, in an attempt to determine whether competitors were matching Amazon’s prices. If they were, the complaint says, Amazon would then hike prices in the hope that its competitors would do likewise. An anonymous source familiar with the program told the Journal that the company made more than a billion dollars in revenue by using the algorithm. An Amazon spokesperson told the Journal that the lawsuit “grossly mischaracterized the tool,” and that Nessie was merely intended to keep prices from falling to unsustainable levels.

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