Be Afraid, Jeff Bezos, Be Very Afraid

David Streitfeld. “Be Afraid, Jeff Bezos, be Very Afraid: Citing Amazon’s Dominance, a ‘Legal Prodigy’ Argues for a new Approach to Antitrust Regulation,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 2018, BU 1, 6-7. 

The dead books are on the top floor of Southern Methodist University’s law library.      

     “Antitrust Dilemma.” “The Antitrust Impulse.” “Antitrust in an Expanding Economy.”  Shelf after shelf of volumes ignored for decades.  There are a dozen tomes with transcripts of the congressional hearings on monopoly power in 1949, when the world was in ruins and the Soviets on the march. Lawmakers believed economic concentration would make America more vulnerable. 

     At the end of the antitrust stacks is a table near the window. “This is my command post,” Lina Khan said. 

COMMENT

     The photo accompanying this article shows law student Lina Kahn in law library stacks barely holding onto a toppling armload of hardbound library books.  She’s the author of a highly-cited paper [1] about the possibility of reviving and expanding anti-trust laws in order to rein in the outsized monopoly power of Big Tech. Khan is jump-starting her legal career by delving into historical legal scholarship on a topic that has been long ignored. The “dead” books she is using for her research sat on the shelf for more than 60 years but now it seems they were really just dormant, waiting for the passing of a fad for unregulated free markets. It’s a recurring library narrative -- finding intellectual treasure concealed in unused, supposedly obsolete books.  From an original research perspective, there is deep conflict with the  the commonly-held librarian notion that the most heavily used books are the most valuable.

    Big Tech, of course, is not responding passively to being labeled dangerously monopolistic.  As the article points out, Amazon has already hired its own lawyers to write rebuttals to Kahn. Shortly before this article appeared an op-ed [2] was published on the Forbes,com website (and then quickly redacted due to public ridicule) proposing that since public libraries are “obsolete” they would be better replaced with Amazon.com outlets. The idea was a logical if misguided extension of the tired old idea that public services would be more efficient if they were run like businesses. It’s hard to imagine an Amazon branded “library” outlet that would support antitrust legal research against its own parent company.  Yes, I know there’s a difference between public libraries and academic law libraries, but increasingly corporations are “sponsoring” university professorships in order to guarantee scholarship that is friendly to their own interests and political ideology. 

     Amazon really is overly powerful. Book sales statistics are not very precise, but in 2018,  Amazon sold about 1/2 of all print books, and about 80% of all ebooks (many of them self-published) in the U.S. Market. The company has been known to  promote or suppress publications, sometimes vindictively (such as the 2014 incident when Amazon attacked the publisher Hachette over ebook pricing).  It’s probably no coincidence that American democracy is in a state of crisis. A little trust-busting could be just what's needed right now. 

[1]Khan, Lina M. "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox." Yale Law Journal,  126 (2016): 710.  
[2] Mourdoukoutas, Panos. “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money,” Forbes.com, July 21, 2018 [deleted]