Lina Khan can't make up her mind if Amazon's prices are too low or too high

See Lina Khan Once Went Big Against Amazon. As FTC Chair, She Changed Tack: FTC’s antitrust lawsuit leaves out some allegations from a legal condemnation of Amazon that Khan wrote in law school by Dave Michaels of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"In her 2017 academic paper, Khan argued that Amazon sweet-talked customers by using predatory pricing, or slashed prices so low that it lost money but rivals couldn’t compete. Her paper acknowledged that predatory pricing was almost obsolete as a legal theory, the Supreme Court having set the bar so high that enforcers stopped trying to prove it.

Now the FTC accuses Amazon of hurting consumers with higher prices, mainly through punishing its marketplace sellers if they offer lower discounts anywhere else. It also says Amazon reaps the fruits of monopoly by requiring sellers to use its fulfillment service.

“It’s really hard to square the circle of the earlier theory of harm that Lina Khan enunciated with the current complaint,” said John Mayo, an economist who leads Georgetown University’s Center for Business and Public Policy. “The earlier complaint was that prices were going to be too low and therefore anticompetitive. And now the theory is they are too high and they are anticompetitive.”"