I’ve been a broken record arguing that the Democrats can only really only begin to win back rural, small-town white working class voters if they do something that will actually improve local economies, and nothing will improve local economies more that getting serious about antitrust enforcement so that entrepreneurs and local businesses can compete again with the giant monopolies. So, I am obviously thrilled to see the Biden administration demonstrate the courage to take on the biggest retail monopoly in the world.

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general today sued Amazon.com, Inc. alleging that the online retail and technology company is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power. The FTC and its state partners say Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.

The complaint alleges that Amazon violates the law not because it is big, but because it engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging. By stifling competition on price, product selection, quality, and by preventing its current or future rivals from attracting a critical mass of shoppers and sellers, Amazon ensures that no current or future rival can threaten its dominance. Amazon’s far-reaching schemes impact hundreds of billions of dollars in retail sales every year, touch hundreds of thousands of products sold by businesses big and small and affect over a hundred million shoppers.

This isn’t an easy lift because Amazon provides an incredible service and is broadly popular. But the FTC gets the problem correct by focusing not just on the harm done to consumers, which can be hard to demonstrate, but also the harm done to businesses that use and often rely on Amazon. The goliath corporation’s monopoly power, which prevents any true rival from emerging, is what makes both of these injustices possible.

The FTC and states allege Amazon’s anticompetitive conduct occurs in two markets—the online superstore market that serves shoppers and the market for online marketplace services purchased by sellers. These tactics include:

  • Anti-discounting measures that punish sellers and deter other online retailers from offering prices lower than Amazon, keeping prices higher for products across the internet. For example, if Amazon discovers that a seller is offering lower-priced goods elsewhere, Amazon can bury discounting sellers so far down in Amazon’s search results that they become effectively invisible.
  • Conditioning sellers’ ability to obtain “Prime” eligibility for their products—a virtual necessity for doing business on Amazon—on sellers using Amazon’s costly fulfillment service, which has made it substantially more expensive for sellers on Amazon to also offer their products on other platforms. This unlawful coercion has in turn limited competitors’ ability to effectively compete against Amazon.

This challenge won’t bring back brick and mortar retail, but it could lead to a much fairer online marketplace where people can compete and be profitable. And that’s a start toward recreating an economy that can work for folks who aren’t living in major economic hubs of the country. There are a lot of small business people who will immediately understand how this benefits them. It will take more work to make consumers understand that they’re getting better prices both because of more choice but because sellers have less overhead.

Amazon has been massively destructive to small business in the same way as Wal-Mart before it. This is a step toward rectifying that and showing that the Democrats actually are on the side of ordinary folks in flyover country.