Americans love Amazon. The app has over 197 million monthly active users, there are over 12 million products sold on the platform, and a whopping 70% of Americans are Prime members. It’s more popular than Facebook, Twitter, and most government institutions, and it isn’t hard to see why. Amazon has drastically transformed our way of living, making it possible to get practically anything you want delivered to your door within days, sometimes even hours—and at prices that often beat its brick and mortar competitors. It doesn’t seem like consumers have much to complain about.

And that’s supposed to be the basis of antitrust actions. Known as the consumer welfare standard, this precedent dictates that the government should only go to the extreme extent of exerting antitrust against a private business when it is actually a monopoly, and when it has used that monopoly to harm consumers. It would be pretty impossible to argue either standard applies to Amazon.

But that’s the point, Khan wants to drastically overhaul our economy and she sees an expansion of the ways antitrust is used as the vehicle to do that.

[I’m not sure whether this is a serious threat or not, given Khan’s lousy track record so far. However, Amazon didn’t achieve its market dominance *just* on superior delivery of goods and services. Jeff Bezos made significant acquisitions and expansions to eliminate competition too. Google is almost certainly far worse in deploying monopolistic behavior, but Bezos and Amazon aren’t saints either. Conservatives have a well-founded skepticism about government intervention in markets, but the massive amount of consolidation in Big Tech especially has left economic and political power in very few hands. That should concern conservatives, especially after seeing that power get deployed to silence and suppress dissent over the last few years with the Big Tech-government censorship complex. — Ed]