First-order effects

• Software firms that run workloads on AWS while competing with Amazon now have a credible avenue to raise complaints about discriminatory treatment of non-exclusive clients, since the FTC is actively soliciting exactly this evidence.
• AWS faces the prospect of its discounting and bundling terms toward customers who also buy from rivals being treated as exclusionary conduct, putting contract design under antitrust review.

Second-order effects

• Amazon's recusal campaign against Khan sharpens from a PR dispute into a legal shield attempt, because a chair she cannot recuse from could greenlight a case touching the company's highest-margin business alongside the marketplace complaint the FTC is honing.
• Rival clouds gain a regulatory opening: if exclusivity-linked discounts become an FTC target at AWS, Microsoft — itself under a Khan-opened FTC probe Ferguson is carrying forward — and other providers face pressure to justify similar contract structures rather than exploit them.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds, cloud infrastructure joins retail marketplace as a standing FTC litigation front, meaning hyperscaler contract terms — exclusivity discounts, bundled commitments — get redesigned defensively across the industry regardless of which chair sits atop the commission.
• The probe's survival across leadership transitions points to Big Tech antitrust becoming institutionalized at the FTC rather than personality-driven, raising the baseline compliance cost of dominant-platform contract terms.