Written by Judy Godoy
(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc has won the partial dismissal of a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission accusing it of maintaining illegal monopolies, although details of the ruling issued by a federal court in Seattle on Monday were not immediately clear.
The Federal Trade Commission accused the online retailer of using anti-competitive tactics to maintain dominance among department stores and online marketplaces. Amazon asked U.S. District Judge John Chun to dismiss the case in December, saying the FTC had presented no evidence of harm to consumers.
Last year, the Federal Trade Commission alleged that Amazon.com (NASDAQ:), which has a billion items in its online supermarket, was using an algorithm that raised the prices paid by American households by more than $1 billion. Amazon said in court papers that it stopped using the program in 2019.
Chun issued a sealed ruling, partially approving Amazon’s proposal. The FTC will be allowed to continue pursuing any claims not permanently dismissed by the judge, court records show.
Chun also ruled that the case would be tried in two parts, rejecting Amazon’s offer that the FTC present evidence of the alleged violations and proposed remedies in the same trial.
An FTC spokesperson declined to comment on the matter. An Amazon spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In its complaint last year, the FTC alleged that Amazon stifles competition, in part by pushing sellers to use advertising and fulfillment services. Amazon argued in its motion to dismiss that its price-matching and flagship shipping services benefit consumers, examples of its efforts to compete with thousands of online and brick-and-mortar retailers. The case is one of five massive lawsuits in which antitrust regulators at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the US Department of Justice are pursuing big tech companies. Facebook owners Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:) and Apple (NASDAQ:) are being sued, and Alphabet’s Google subsidiary (NASDAQ:) faces two lawsuits, one of which is the same. A judge recently found that it illegally stifles competition between online search engines.
The Amazon.com case is an important one for Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan, who has long pushed to challenge the power of the massive online retailer. In 2017, Khan wrote an influential academic article arguing that the company’s structure and practices pose anti-competitive concerns and have escaped antitrust scrutiny.