Amazon just won a partial victory against the FTC

• Amazon won a partial dismissal of an FTC lawsuit alleging illegal monopoly practices.
• The FTC accused Amazon of stifling competition by forcing sellers to use its service.
• The ruling is part of the broader government crackdown on Big Tech under the Biden administration.

Amazon just won a partial dismissal of a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit that accused it of operating an illegal monopoly.

In September 2023, the FTC sued Amazon for stifling competition by punishing sellers who sell their items cheaper on rival platforms and for forcing sellers to use Amazon’s own fulfillment service. The watchdog of the competition began investigating Amazon in 2019 over its business practices.

On Monday, a federal judge in Seattle partially granted Amazon’s earlier motion to dismiss the case, Reuters reported, citing court records. In December, the e-commerce giant asked the judge to dismiss the case. At the time, Amazon said its practices were standard for all retailers and the FTC failed to identify harm to consumers.

But the FTC can continue to pursue claims the judge did not dismiss, according to Reuters.

The FTC and Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours.

The lawsuit is one of several FTC investigations into Amazon in recent years as the federal government takes a tougher line against Big Tech companies, including Amazon, Meta, Google and Nvidia.

Last year, the agency sued Amazon in another case, saying it unwittingly lured customers First subscriptions and created a “labyrinthine” process to cancel it. The company “knowingly defrauded millions of consumers,” the FTC said in his complaint, filed in federal court in the state of Washington.

The FTC is too the investigation the company’s use of the signalan encrypted messaging app and how its executives used the disappearing messages feature may have destroyed information relevant to the agency’s investigation.

Cracking down on Big Tech

The partial dismissal comes amid a wave of lawsuits brought by the US government against Big Tech. Under the Biden administration, the FTC scrutinized the agreements more closely and pushed for more aggressive competition policies.

In August, a federal judge described Google as a monopoly and said Alphabet’s bids to make Google the default search engine on other platforms violated competition laws while raking in billions of dollars in revenue. The Justice Department is now considering whether to seek a breakup of the company, Bloomberg reported in August.

That same month, the agency investigated Nvidia’s acquisition of an Israeli AI startup called Run:ai and how the chipmaker pressured cloud providers to buy more products.

Earlier this year, the DOJ sued Apple in an antitrust lawsuit, saying the company illegally maintained a smartphone monopoly by “delaying, degrading or outright blocking” other technologies from the market.

In 2022, the FTC repeatedly tried to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a major video game developer. The agency said the $69 billion deal would stifle gambling competition.

The US government has also recently filed similar lawsuits against Tesla and Meta.