Brain Death at the FTC and FCC

Net neutrality and Amazon show why Congress needs to kill agencies as well as creating new ones

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. Excerpts:

"Amazon controls a third of online sales and a single-digit share of all retail sales. Its business is smaller than Walmart’s. How does it become a monopoly? Only through the tired trick of inventing a new category, online superstore, which it can be accused of monopolizing. Yet as not a single critic failed to point out, consumers don’t buy thousands of goods at a time. They buy one or a few. Because consumers have no trouble comparing prices at non-superstore retailers, even those specializing in a single product line, Amazon can’t usually get away with charging even a penny more than competing online retailers do.

Seeing how badly its argument was flying, the FTC then let out that Amazon had once used software to test if price hikes would stick. What business doesn’t? The need to test if price hikes will stick again reveals only that Amazon is no monopolist."

"The sequel in that case is also telling. To their credit, Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and the courts undid the damage as quickly as Mr. Wheeler did it. Internet investment soon revived. We got the faster fixed and wireless speeds that Ms. Rosenworcel so head-scratchingly now wants to jeopardize all over again. The moral is one this column has preached for 20 years. Those who come to Washington to take over our tired, old agencies often do their best work in protecting America from our tired, old agencies."