Tech giant Amazon recently demanded that the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission be recused from any antitrust investigations into the company, according to the Daily Caller.
Amazon filed the petition with the FTC on Wednesday, accusing Chairwoman Lina Khan of being biased due to the fact that she “has, on numerous occasions, argued that Amazon is guilty of antitrust violations and should be broken up.” The petition continued by declaring that “these statements convey to any reasonable observer the clear impression that she has already made up her mind about many material facts relevant to Amazon’s antitrust culpability as well as about the ultimate issue of culpability itself.”
The FTC is already conducting several antitrust investigations, including against Amazon; their most recent efforts are focusing on Amazon’s possible acquisition of the film studio Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), a purchase of nearly $9 billion announced last month.
Khan was announced by Joe Biden to be his pick for FTC Chair in March, and was confirmed by the Senate in June. While a student at Yale Law School, Khan wrote a paper titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” among other articles focused on monopolies, antitrust policies, and other similar topics. Amazon’s petition claims that after writing those papers, Khan “has since argued that her legal conclusions about Amazon’s antitrust liability warrant breaking up the company.”
Although there has been recent bipartisan action on pursuing antitrust action against various Big Tech monopolies, those efforts have proven difficult to achieve. Earlier this week, a federal judge dismissed two major antitrust lawsuits against the social media giant Facebook, one filed by the FTC and the other by a group of state attorneys general. The Obama-appointed Judge James Boasberg claimed that neither suit successfully proved that Facebook’s actions have amounted to a monopoly.