Documents and sources: the FTC plans to file a far-reaching case focused on Amazon's core marketplace in the coming weeks after months of honing the complaint
Lina Khan's Federal Trade Commission has already filed three cases against Amazon.com Inc. Now she's gearing up for the Big One.
Context & Ripple Effects
Lina Khan's FTC has already filed three cases against Amazon.com Inc., but each targeted a slice — devices, advertising practices, dark patterns — rather than the retail engine itself. Preparation for the big case was visible early: sources flagged an antitrust lawsuit in the works alongside scrutiny of Prime's bundling practices back in February, and a March overview laid out the full pursuit, including a possible challenge to the $1.7 billion iRobot acquisition.
The complaint has been deliberately slow-cooked — months of honing rather than a fast strike — which signals the FTC wants the core-marketplace case to be structurally comprehensive enough to stand alone. After three smaller suits, this filing is the moment the agency's Amazon campaign moves from probing attacks to a frontal assault on how the marketplace itself operates.
First-order effects
- Amazon immediately shifts into litigation posture on its highest-revenue business, with court filings forcing public disclosure of internal pricing, Prime bundling, and seller-facing documents it has kept private.
- For the FTC, filing consolidates four separate lines of attack — the three existing cases plus the marketplace suit — into one coordinated campaign against a single defendant.
Second-order effects
- Scrutiny spilling past the marketplace pressures Amazon's M&A pipeline, most visibly the $1.7 billion iRobot deal, which now gets evaluated by regulators already primed to see Amazon expansionism as the problem.
- Third-party sellers gain negotiating leverage for the duration of the case: any fee or placement practice the FTC names becomes a bargaining chip sellers can cite against Amazon directly.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US antitrust enforcement settles into a template of cumulative campaigns — many small filings building evidence and political cover for one structural suit against a dominant platform — rather than single decisive strikes.
- A credible FTC challenge to marketplace mechanics would make platform self-preferencing and service bundling standing enforcement categories, raising the regulatory bar every large marketplace operator must clear going forward.
The trend: US antitrust enforcement is shifting from merger-by-merger review to sustained multi-case campaigns against dominant platform marketplaces, with the FTC's escalating Amazon effort as the defining test.