WHEN: Today, Wednesday, September 27, 2023
WHERE: CNBC’s “Squawk Box”
Following are excerpts from the unofficial transcript of a CNBC interview with FTC Chair Lina Khan on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” (M-F, 6AM-9AM ET) today, Wednesday, September 27. Following are links to video on CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2023/09/27/ftc-chair-lina-khan-amazon-lawsuit-is-about-protecting-free-and-fair-competition.html and https://www.cnbc.com/video/2023/09/27/ftc-chair-lina-khan-we-only-bring-cases-when-we-believe-theres-a-law-violation.html.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
KHAN ON AMAZON LAWSUIT & MONOPOLY
LINA KHAN: This lawsuit is fundamentally about protecting free and fair competition and the U.S. antitrust laws prohibit firms from using their monopoly power to punish or preclude or prevent competition and that’s what our lawsuit lays out and that is what Amazon has done.
KHAN: So what this lawsuit does is it talks about the direct evidence of Amazon’s monopoly power both with regard to sellers where it’s been steadily increasing the take rate so that it now takes one of every two dollars but also in regard to quality so we lay out in the complaint how Amazon has rolled out this pay to play advertising scheme that is actually showing consumers less relevant results and steering them to more expensive products.
KHAN ON AMAZON’S TACTICS
KHAN: And what Amazon’s tactics have been about is once it self-achieved that scale, it’s been focused on tactics that deprive rivals of the ability to gain that similar critical mass of customers.
KHAN: Sellers have to inflate their price not just on Amazon but also across the rest of the internet and in practice, what that means is that if you had a platform or a retailer that was actually more efficient or that was actually more innovation, it would not actually be able to compete on price because of Amazon’s anti-discounting tactics that punish any sellers if they are in any other retailer or platform while lowering prices so Amazon’s tactics are closing off the dimension of price competition which is an incredibly important form of competition in ways for other firms to be competing on the merits so that is the dynamic that we lay out in the complaint.
