NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {F} ederal Trade Commission chairwoman Lina Khan has at last embarked on the expedition to bag the white whale that has haunted her for so long. With the news that the FTC has finally filed the antitrust suit it advertised for months against the online retailer Amazon, Khan seeks to bring America’s most liked private institution to heel once and for all.

The FTC has accused Amazon of attempting to block efforts by sellers with access to its platform from marketing their goods at cheaper prices on competing websites. The agency alleges that Amazon blocked those sellers from gaining access to its warehouses and delivery services, which constitutes an anticompetitive practice. As evidence of the material harm these practices do to consumers, Khan’s agency maintains that this allegedly monopolistic misuse of Amazon’s power drives up the cost of goods for sellers and consumers alike.

And yet, as Khan’s widely read 2017 Yale Law Review article stipulated, Amazon does indirect harm in bringing down the cost of goods, too. After all, in her view, the conception of what constitutes an antitrust violation in U.S. law is too narrow, and “the undue focus on consumer welfare is misguided.”

It betrays legislative history, which reveals that Congress passed antitrust laws to promote a host of political economic ends—including our interests as workers, producers, entrepreneurs, and citizens. It also mistakenly supplants a concern about process and structure (i.e., whether power is sufficiently distributed to keep markets competitive) with a calculation regarding outcome (i.e., whether consumers are materially better off).

Khan maintained that “there is growing public awareness that Amazon has established itself as an essential part of the internet economy, and a gnawing sense that its dominance—its sheer scale and breadth—may pose hazards.” If it was ever justified, the perception of Amazon as a prohibitive gatekeeper in the online retail market space that Khan articulated in the middle of the last decade may already be out of date.

“The soaring popularity of shopping platforms Temu and Shein among U.S. consumers startled Amazon.com,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week. “Executives have seen there is a market for bargain items that take longer to arrive and have tried to figure out if they should make such offerings on their own site more discoverable and available.” The existence of competition in Amazon’s sector that is compelling the firm to revise its business practices militates against the notion that it is a monopolistic bulwark standing athwart competition.

And yet, this assumes that Khan is playing to win. In fact, her record suggests that throwing wild haymakers at her targets, which courts have so far found wholly unimpressive, is a strategy in itself. It is designed to remake the legal landscape so it might one day become friendlier to her vision of what should constitute competition in the marketplace.

Since Khan assumed her role, the FTC has prosecuted a number of high-stakes antitrust cases against large businesses. Much of the time, her agency has come up short. Overruling its in-house judge, Khan’s agency sued the gene-sequencing firm Illumina with the aim of forcing it to divest its acquisition of the cancer blood-test producer Grail. The appellate court to which Illumina appealed the order on constitutional grounds stayed the FTC’s hand and appears receptive to the firm’s arguments. A district judge rejected the FTC’s argument that United Health Group engaged in an effort to illegally suppress competition in health-insurance markets and dismissed a challenge to the group’s efforts to purchase the health-technology provider Change Healthcare. Khan’s agency slinked away from its attempt to break up Facebook’s parent company Meta after a court allowed the firm to purchase the virtual-reality-content producer Within. Microsoft succeeded in its effort to purchase the software maker Blizzard after a judge ruled that the maker of the video-game system Xbox wasn’t engaged in a monopolistic enterprise by seeking to corner the market for the first-person-shooter Call of Duty.

“I think chair Khan is ideologically motivated. She wants to change merger law in the U.S. fundamentally,” said University of Washington law professor Douglas Ross. “The problem she has is that many of her ideas don’t improve consumer welfare; some of her ideas would decrease consumer welfare.” St. John’s University law and business professor Anthony Sabino concurred. “She’s trying to change a century’s worth of antitrust law overnight, and that’s not necessarily wise,” he observed.

And yet, though the series of high-profile face-plants to which she has committed her agency may sap Khan of “her deterrent effect,” Northwestern University law professor John McGinnis conceded, what the FTC commissioner ultimately wants is “to permanently change the law.” By playing to lose — and doing so in spectacular fashion — she may still achieve her ultimate objective.

“She might hope after 2024 or at some point in the future that these losses will be seized upon by her allies in Congress” to revise antitrust statutes so they more closely reflect Khan’s vision, McGinnis speculated. “This is kind of a ‘winning by losing’ strategy.” Given her losing record, it’s perhaps unwise to stipulate that Khan is playing the long game, laying the groundwork for sweeping legislative reforms in 2025 and beyond in the assumption that Democrats retake both chambers of Congress. But it’s not out of the question, and nothing else explains her conduct beyond her ideological monomania.

But Khan’s thus-far quixotic crusade has the support of Joe Biden and his administration. As Dominic Pino aptly observed, the sort of “progress” the administration’s “progressives” seek is, in fact, a restoration of mid-20th-century consumer-welfare standards that were long ago retired in favor of rules that paved the way for an incredible flowering of innovation in the technology sector. The Biden administration sees the word “competition” as an Orwellian euphemism for compelling profitable enterprises to sacrifice their competitive advantages not for the benefit of consumers who might enjoy lower prices but to curtail corporate power.

In that way, antitrust under the Biden administration has become an end in and of itself, not a means to a more competitive marketplace in which consumers benefit. It’s Elizabeth Warrenism without Elizabeth Warren — save, that is, for the fact that the prosecutors of this ideological crusade have so far lost more fights than they have won.