On June 1, Beijing time, according to three people familiar with the matter, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) revised the antitrust investigation on Amazon, reorganized the investigation team, re interviewed potential witnesses, and raised questions about Amazon's recent acquisition of MGM Studios.
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FTC has been investigating the antitrust issues of Amazon's retail business and cloud computing services since 2019. Lina Khan became the chairman of FTC last year. She is famous for publishing a pioneering legal article on Amazon's possible violation of anti-monopoly law. She also expressed interest in the investigation.
She assigned the Amazon case to John Newman. Newman is an antitrust professor and former prosecutor of the Ministry of justice. He joined FTC as deputy director of competition affairs last December and reorganized the team investigating Amazon. In contrast, during the trump administration, FTC chose to give priority to the antitrust investigation of Facebook and only assigned two lawyers to Amazon.
Before joining FTC from Columbia Law School, Lena Khan was a member of the judicial antitrust Subcommittee of the house of Representatives, which spent 16 months investigating Google, Amazon, Apple Company and meta. In the 449 page report finally released by the house of Representatives, she focused on Google. A staff member of FTC is responsible for Amazon.
