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Lina Khan turns up the heat on Amazon

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In 2017, Lina Khan, then a 29-year-old law student, rose to fame with an academic paper on why Amazon should be curtailed. Contrary to prevailing trends in antitrust law, Khan argued that the e-commerce giant unfairly dominated large parts of the US economy.

Now the chairman of the FTC, Ms. Khan has finally taken on Amazon, though her agency’s new lawsuit against the company doesn’t focus on antitrust. Still, legal experts wonder if, and when, she’ll continue the theory that made her famous in the first place.

On Wednesday, the FTC accused Amazon of tricking customers into signing up for Prime, the company’s shipping and video streaming service. According to the agency, Amazon used “manipulative, coercive or deceptive” design tactics — known as “dark patterns” — on its website to entice millions to sign up and “deliberately complicate” the cancellation process.

“Amazon has tricked and tricked people into recurring subscriptions without their consent,” Ms Khan said. The FTC wants the court to stop Amazon from engaging in these practices and impose a financial penalty.

The company denied the FTC’s claims, called them “incorrect about the facts and the law” and claimed it makes things “clear and simple for customers to sign up for or cancel their Prime membership.” Amazon added that the FTC filed a lawsuit without notice while the two were still negotiating the claims.

This is not the confrontation Washington expected. To be fair, the FTC has made manipulative design practices around subscriptions a focus, and “going after a company as big as Amazon sends a message to other players in the industry,” John Davisson, a senior advisor at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told The Times.

Amazon had already girded up for a fight with Ms Khan, having moved in 2021 to become her withdrawn from FTC antitrust investigations in the company because of her previous criticism. (Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, had previously and unsuccessfully sought something similar.)

Yet the FTC’s antitrust bureau has spent years investigating Amazon for its competitive practices. And Khan has put into practice the broader ideas behind her law review article as the bureau chief, leading many in Washington to speculate that a bigger battle with Amazon is a matter of when, not if.

  • In other news, the FTC and Microsoft will appear in court on Thursday on whether the tech giant’s $69 billion takeover bid for Activision Blizzard should go through. The witness list for the proceedings includes Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, and Bobby Kotick, the chief executive of Activision.

The search for the missing submarine is entering a ‘critical day’. More rescue ships are ready to team up to find the Titan, including a robot capable of reaching the sea floor. Air supplies for the five passengers on board are believed to be running low, though some experts say careful breathing could prolong that for some time.

Senator Chuck Schumer charts a path for AI regulation. The majority leader called for an approach that prioritizes objectives such as accountability, innovation and security, without endorsing specific proposals. Emphasizing that Congress “must join the AI ​​revolution,” Mr. Schumer hopes lawmakers can come up with a bill within months.

The Senate banking committee approves a revision of the banking rules. All but two members of the panel agreed to tougher penalties for the leaders of failing lenders, increased Fed oversight and other measures proposed in the aftermath of the regional banking crisis. The bipartisan move will pressure House Republicans to pass similar legislation.

The Bank of England raises interest rates more than expected. The central bank on Thursday increased rates by 0.5 percentage point, despite predictions that it would opt for a quarter-point increase. The decision was announced a day after the latest data showed Britain’s headline inflation stalled at 8.7 percent in May, higher than economists had forecast.

Stocks appear to be heading for their fourth consecutive day of losses as investors worry that continued inflation will pressure the Fed to raise interest rates not once, but twice more this year, risking a blow to the economy.

But all is not bleak in the markets, with the price of Bitcoin rising on hopes that the cryptocurrency will soon go mainstream, following a regulatory crackdown on some of the crypto industry’s biggest exchanges.

Investors come to the idea of ​​long-term higher interest rates. Fed chairman Jay Powell testified before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday that more increases in the prime lending rate may be needed to discourage corporate and consumer spending.

“Inflationary pressures remain high and the process of bringing inflation back to 2 percent has a long way to go,” Powell told lawmakers.

This assessment leads to pessimism in the markets. Stocks fell, especially technology stocks that just a few weeks ago propelled the S&P 500 into a bull market in hopes that the Fed was about to finish tightening rates.

Meanwhile, bearish investors are more and more bets that stock prices will fall. And economists are concerned about the consequences of ending a pause on federal student loan repayments.

Going against the darkness is…Bitcoin, which jumped above $30,000 Thursday morning. Behind the rally is hope that regulators will finally accept the cryptocurrency in Main Street Finance: the price is up more than 20 percent in the past week, since then BlackRock filed with the SEC to run a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund. Rival money managers soon followed. Another vote of confidence came from Mr Powell himself, who said on Wednesday that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin “stamina.”

The SEC has not previously approved spot Bitcoin ETF applications, citing concerns that such investment products would be vulnerable to fraud and wild market swings. But Bitcoin enthusiasts are hoping that BlackRock – the world’s largest manager of ETFs, with a lot of influence in Washington – can change that.

“The probable assumption is that BlackRock might know somethingNate Geraci, the president of consulting firm The ETF Store, told Bloomberg.

As the Biden administration tries to hold back China’s technological expansion in the name of national security, it is exploring a new concern, The Times’ David McCabe reports: cloud computing.

The move could further complicate the digital cold war between the two countries as US officials send mixed signals about how they want to deal with Beijing.

The White House is exploring possible limits on Chinese cloud providers when operating in the United States, and have discussed ways to limit their growth abroad. As part of that effort, officials have spoken with US tech giants like Microsoft and Alphabet about how their Chinese counterparts like Alibaba and Huawei operate.

Behind the move is concern that Beijing could use data centers in the US and abroad to access sensitive data. Similar concerns underlie US efforts to curb Chinese telecom companies and TikTok, the video app. Chinese companies account for a small share of cloud services in the US, but have made inroads in Asia and Latin America.

Beneath the steps, the White House weighs are tightening the Ministry of Commerce’s rules for Chinese cloud companies and talking to foreign governments about the matter. The Biden administration is also studying ways to help US cloud providers compete with Chinese rivals who, backed by government subsidies, could undercut their prices.

The potential cloud battle can only complicate US-China ties, who have been zigzagging in recent days. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Beijing was intended to stabilize relations and sparked positive feedback from both sides, but the Chinese government reacted angrily to President Biden’s comments on Tuesday. comparing President Xi Jinping to a dictator.

— Lisa Lipmana real estate agent in Manhattan, about an apparent power shift on Wall Street: bankers are no longer the biggest lenders.

As the Justice Department investigates the potential merger of the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf over antitrust issues, a common question has been asked among deal watchers: will the government Real defend millionaire golfers who would be affected by the move?

The answer, DealBook hears: very possible – and there’s a legal reason for that.

The Justice Department under President Biden deals with labor issues. The agency’s antitrust division cited them as a rationale for the successful attempt to block Penguin Random House’s takeover bid for Simon & Schuster, saying that deal would have reduced the author’s fee. Labor issues are also at the heart of the department’s existing investigation into the PGA Tour.

The department wants to build case law on the impact of deals on labour. While the “efficiency” that companies tout as a benefit of mergers often translates into “fewer workers,” it’s difficult to attribute job losses directly to acquisitions.

But it’s easier to demonstrate the effect of a deal on labor in specialized industries like sports, where athletes don’t have many options about where to work. Any work the Justice Department is doing here could lay the groundwork for countering deals in other areas, including entertainment, hospitals and media.

The politics of this now favor regulators. When the FTC investigated the PGA Tour in the 1990s, there were several lawmakers wrote to the department defending the organization, and the investigation stalled.

But Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the PGA-LIV deal changes the calculus in Washington. In scheduling a hearing on the potential deal, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic chair of a Senate panel investigating the matter, expressed concern about “what the Saudi takeover means for the future of this cherished American institution and our national interest.”

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