Three Questions about Platform Market Power: Whether there is it, whether and how to regulate it

Drawing on regulatory cases from Western countries with standardized market-oriented systems, this article tries to answer three questions:
1, Does a platform have market power. The conclusion is: yes, but that does not mean it is illegal.
2, Should market power be restricted. The conclusion is: not unconditionally no.
3, How do you impose restrictions? There are qualitative principles: a platform cannot be the same as the market or stand above the market (and neither can the government), but it is hard to explain clearly in a single sentence.
This involves accounting and legal provisions, which can be rather brain-bending. I will do my best to write in a way that is not too brain-bending (and therefore there may indeed be oversights in the simplification). But this article is not really suitable for people who like to read slogan-shouting, swing-the-club, and smart-sounding tricks. It is also quite long and tests your “context” awareness. You also need some basic literacy—such as being able to tell the difference between power and rights—or if you like to take a side and ask me which side I stand on, my advice is: go out and turn right.
It was agreed in advance.
Whether the platform is an intermediary is not a particularly important question. You could even say that “intermediary” itself isn’t a particularly meaningful word.
In fact, a platform is a matchmaking intermediary. The defining feature of a matchmaking intermediary is that it earns a commission based on successful matching. So the phrase about not letting the intermediary earn a spread doesn’t really apply to it. In a broad sense, maybe it can be made to fit, too, but broadly speaking, it still doesn’t capture the core.
Any commercial activity needs intermediaries. Wholesalers are intermediaries, shopping malls are intermediaries, credit card companies are intermediaries, and hotel booking websites are also intermediaries. As long as intermediaries can reduce search, credit, payment, logistics, and transaction costs, it is normal business exchange for them to take a portion of transaction revenue. If a transaction that originally would have gone through five layers of distributors is compressed into a single click by a matchmaking platform, then even if that platform earns a substantial amount from it, you cannot infer from that that it has obtained “profits it shouldn’t have.”
Even if a platform displaces how much traditional business, in Europe and the United States, that is not a question that competition policy is especially concerned about. When new business models replace old ones, that is something that market competition frequently involves.
The real problem appears elsewhere: once an intermediary is successful enough that large numbers of buyers and sellers gather there, it stops being just a normal market participant and becomes part of the market itself. It can decide who can enter, how goods are ordered, how transactions are charged, what kinds of prices will get traffic, and whether a merchant can truly leave if it is dissatisfied with these rules.
That is this: market power. The Supreme Court has long used one definition: a firm’s ability to raise prices above levels in competitive markets; an even stronger concept is “monopoly power,” which typically means the ability to control prices or exclude competition. [1]
But market power is only a label; it does not by itself mean illegal conduct. If a company gains a huge market share because its product is better and its efficiency is higher, antitrust policy does not therefore require that it be broken up. What antitrust truly cares about is whether competitors, merchants, and consumers can still effectively constrain it, and whether the company uses the power it has already obtained to block that constraint. [1]
So the truly difficult problem for platform regulation isn’t really “whether platforms should be regulated,” but rather three other questions: when does a platform already obtain market power worth taking seriously? When does such power begin to harm competition? And how far should regulation go so that it doesn’t destroy the efficiencies that the platform originally created?
In the past ten-plus years, in both Europe and the United States, I deliberately excluded regulatory cases that were content-related (which usually involves ideology) and focused on purely commercial, purely economic issues. They offer a set of answers with similarities, but not exactly the same.
A European regulatory case: Booking.com, a saga that has ebbed and flowed over nearly ten years. The back-and-forth between the company and regulators has been fascinating and representative: does the platform have the right to restrict hotels from selling at lower prices through other channels via contracts?
Booking’s basic business structure is not complicated. Hotels list rooms on the platform; Booking brings large numbers of consumers to the hotel, handles search, comparison, reviews, and booking, and charges a commission after the transaction is completed. The platform itself doesn’t need to operate a hotel, so there isn’t even the problem of “the platform being both judge and player,” because it has no self-operated inventory.
The contradiction lies in “price parity clauses.”
Suppose a hotel’s room price on Booking is 100 euros, Booking charges a 15% commission, and the hotel ultimately receives 85 euros. Then the hotel naturally thinks: if consumers come directly to my website, I don’t need to pay a 15-euro commission—why can’t I lower the website price to 90 euros?—That’s the broad notion of preventing intermediaries from earning the spread.
This looks completely consistent with market competition, and consumers would seemingly applaud.
But Booking has another business logic that can also be understood: consumers know about this hotel—likely precisely because Booking bears the search, information matching, review system, and marketing costs. Consumers use Booking to find the hotel, but then go to the hotel’s official website to complete the purchase. The hotel benefits from the services provided by Booking, yet bypasses the platform commission.
This is the free-riding problem in economics.
Booking therefore long used so-called price parity clauses. Early “broad parity clauses” required hotels not to offer better conditions on other online booking platforms or on their own sales channels. Later, Booking narrowed the restrictions: hotels could list lower prices on other booking platforms, but the hotel’s own publicly operated website still could not be cheaper than Booking. [2]
And that’s what makes the problem more interesting.
If the price on Booking is 100 euros and the hotel’s own website is also 100 euros, consumers effectively have no way to see the cost of Booking’s intermediary service. Even if another sales method requires only 90 euros, consumers still do not have an opportunity to use price to tell Booking whether your service is actually worth those 10 euros.
But if the hotel can sell for 90 euros on its own website, the situation is different.
Consumers can judge for themselves: Booking provides search, reviews, credit, and convenience—am I willing to pay an extra 10 euros for these services? If yes, continue using Booking; if no, go to the hotel’s official website.
More importantly, if more and more people choose the latter, Booking will truly face price pressure: lower commissions, improved services, or proving that its services are indeed worth the money.
It is precisely along similar logic that, in 2015, the German Federal Cartel Office (an independent federal body responsible for antitrust and competition regulation) found that Booking’s “narrow best price clauses” violated German and European competition law and required it to stop using them. [2]
Booking said it disagreed and filed suit, and at one point it won in the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court. The core defense raised by the platform is not absurd: if it cannot prevent free-riding, then when the platform invests resources to build a search and booking system that is continuously bypassed by hotels, the platform’s own investment incentives are also harmed.
In 21, Germany’s Federal Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s judgment again and restored the ban issued by Germany’s Federal Cartel Office. The high court acknowledged that hotel booking platforms clearly can improve transaction efficiency, but said the existing evidence was insufficient to prove that narrowly defined parity clauses are indispensable conditions for Booking to provide those services. Prior to that, the German regulator had also conducted a market investigation—observing the behavior of hotels and consumers after cancellation of the clauses—to test the claim that “without parity clauses, platforms cannot operate effectively.” [3]
In September 2024, the dispute went further to the Court of Justice of the European Union. In Case C-264/23, the CJEU explicitly stated that, whether broad or narrow parity clauses, as a matter of principle they cannot be viewed as automatically necessary “ancillary restraints” for the platform’s core business merely because they have the effect of preventing free-riding, and thus automatically fall outside normal competition-law review. [4]
A legal nuance matters here: the Court of Justice of the European Union is not saying that all price parity clauses are automatically unlawful in every situation. Instead, it blocks a very important path of defense—platforms cannot simply say “this is necessary to protect my business model” and end the discussion about competition effects and necessity. [4]
And this is exactly why this case is truly worth observing, not because of “Europe cracking down on big platforms.”
The court never denied the transaction efficiencies that Booking created. The point of dispute is here: to protect these efficiencies, does it really require restricting hotels from competing on prices through their own sales channels?
That is to say, both sides have an account to balance.
On one side, the cost of platform investment is undermined by free-riding; on the other, the cost created after price competition is cut off. Regulators don’t need to care which side is more deserving of sympathy and support. They only need to determine which restriction is necessary, and which restriction has gone beyond the degree required to protect the platform’s business model.
Later, this logic moved from case-by-case enforcement into ex ante regulation.
In May 2024, the European Commission designated Booking.com as a “gatekeeper” within the meaning of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and its related obligations took effect from 14 November of that year. [5] DMA Article 5(3) requires gatekeepers to allow business users to sell to consumers at different prices and terms through other intermediary platforms or through their own direct sales channels. The European Commission’s 2026 assessment of the DMA’s implementation also lists the removal of such parity restrictions as one of the market changes that have already occurred. [6]
Europe has followed a very clear path: first, in specific cases, ask whether a platform rule limits competition; then test the platform’s efficiency defenses through judicial debate; and only afterward elevate some of the recurring problems into pre-emptive rules aimed at “gatekeepers.”
But if you jump to a simple conclusion—“as long as the platform restricts merchants’ choices, regulation should be prohibited”—the U.S. Supreme Court would provide a very important counterexample.
Three
In 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice sued American Express, Visa, and Mastercard—three well-known credit card networks.
At the time, they all had different degrees of “anti-steering rules.” Merchants know that different credit cards impose different transaction costs on them, but they cannot freely encourage consumers to use lower-cost payment instruments through discounts, rewards, or by providing cost information.
Visa and Mastercard chose to soften their stance. In their settlement with the Department of Justice, they agreed to allow merchants to offer discounts, express preferences for certain payment methods, and disclose cost differences that different payment instruments create for consumers. American Express dug in and decided to keep fighting in court. [7]
The logic of the Department of Justice is quite close to that in the Booking case.
Suppose a consumer buys $100 worth of goods. American Express imposes a $3 cost on the merchant, while another credit card imposes a $2 cost.
If merchants cannot tell consumers about these differences, then for consumers, the price of using two cards is $100. A payment network with lower costs cannot turn its advantage into a price advantage that consumers can see, and the competitive pressure facing the higher-cost network declines accordingly.
In 2015, a U.S. district court in the Eastern District of New York first supported the government. The court found that American Express’s anti-steering rules weakened price competition among credit card networks focused on merchant fees, increased merchant fees, and prevented low-cost business models from entering the market. [8]
The reversal came from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which overturned the original ruling. In June 2018, the Supreme Court also sided with American Express 5–4 and upheld its victory—game over. [9]
The key issue raised by the Supreme Court is: when dealing with a credit card network in a two-sided market, is the government accounting for only half of the numbers?
Merchants pay American Express higher fees, of course. But credit card networks then use part of that revenue to provide cardholders with points, cash back, and other rewards and services. It is entirely possible that merchants accept a higher-fee credit card precisely because that card can attract customers with specific spending capabilities and spending preferences.
Therefore, proving only that merchants on that side pay higher fees is not enough to show that competition in the entire relevant market has been harmed.
The Supreme Court held that, in this special two-sided transaction platform, the government at least needs to prove that the entire credit card transaction market experienced anticompetitive effects—for example, price increases when both sides are considered together, suppressed transaction volumes, or other identifiable competitive harms. The court ultimately found that the government failed to complete that proof. [9]
This of course does not mean that a platform only needs to claim “I create consumer value,” and that any rule restricting competition will automatically be valid. In fact, this decision itself relies on a market analysis approach that was opposed strongly by the U.S. government and the minority opinion in a 5–4 split. [9]
But this case leaves an extremely important warning:
A merchant’s interests do not necessarily equal the interests of the entire market.
When a platform increases merchants’ fees, you can’t automatically infer that social efficiency falls. Conversely, when regulatory measures lower merchants’ fees, that alone cannot automatically prove that consumers will ultimately benefit.
Booking reminds regulators not to focus only on calculating the platform’s loss from free-riding.
American Express, in turn, reminds regulators that they also can’t just calculate the platform costs borne by merchants.
Put the two cases together and you see where platform regulation is truly difficult: it’s not about proving that someone suffers a loss because of platform rules. Rather, it’s about proving—these next words are quite roundabout, but I’ll do my best—whether that loss, within a complete competitive structure, constitutes a competitive harm that warrants intervention, and whether the benefits produced by intervention outweigh the platform efficiencies that are sacrificed.
Four
Beyond price, there’s another form of platform power that is more hidden: whether you can actually leave, or whether you can use another platform at the same time.
Take a look at the game between the FTC (U.S. Federal Trade Commission) and Surescripts.
Surescripts is an electronic prescription network that connects medical institutions, pharmacies, and other relevant market participants. In the United States, it is the largest and most widely covered. There is an industry consensus that “almost all U.S. electronic prescriptions flow through Surescripts.” As a result, it is viewed as core infrastructure for the flow of electronic prescriptions in the U.S.
In its 2019 lawsuit, the FTC alleged that the company maintained roughly a 95% market share in two relevant electronic prescription service markets for a long time, and increased the cost for customers to use competing networks at the same time through exclusive agreements, loyalty discounts, and other means. [10]
The FTC used a term: multihoming, meaning customers use multiple platforms at the same time.
A dominant platform can of course say: I have never forbidden customers to leave; anyone can choose a competitor.
But what competition policy truly cares about is not whether a contract says “no leaving,” but how high the real economic cost is of leaving or using a second platform at the same time.
For platforms with strong network effects, this problem is especially important.
The more consumers there are, the more willing merchants are to join; the more merchants there are, the more willing consumers are to stay. A new competing platform must solve the problem of insufficient scale on both sides. If the advantaged platform also makes it difficult for customers to conveniently use two networks at the same time through loyalty discounts, exclusive agreements, and similar means, then new entrants will find it harder to accumulate enough scale.
The Surescripts case did not end with a full trial. In March 23, the U.S. district court granted the FTC summary judgment on part of the dispute; afterward, the parties reached a settlement, and in August of the same year the court approved the final order. Surescripts did not admit all the factual allegations in the FTC’s complaint, but agreed to be subject to a series of behavioral restrictions during a 20-year period. [11]
The government did not specify how much Surescripts’ services should cost. Instead, it restricted Surescripts’ ability to constrain customers’ use of competing platforms through requirements that customers allocate most of their share, exclusivity or loyalty arrangements, and it limited how Surescripts could impede customers from trading with competitors via contractual arrangements. When the FTC reviewed the case in 26, it specifically noted that the final order forbade Surescripts from using exclusive or loyalty contracts that required customers to direct 50% or more of their transaction volume to Surescripts, and it limited other contract arrangements that could hinder customers from trading with competitors. [12]
What is restored here is not a “reasonable price” set by the government, but the customers’ actual ability to use a second platform.
This is actually consistent with Booking’s logic.
One case protects price competition among different sales channels; the other protects multi-platform operation and the practical ability to exit.
Five
The FTC’s ongoing antitrust case against Amazon is, for now, bringing these kinds of issues back to ordinary network retail.
This case includes many different allegations, including issues related to Amazon’s self-dealing, Prime, logistics, and so on. If you remove all of that and look only at what the FTC calls “anti-discounting measures,” it would be relatively easy to simplify things.
In the FTC’s complaint filed in 2023, together with 17 states, Amazon was alleged to punish third-party sellers that offer clearly lower prices through other network retail channels through platform mechanisms, thereby preventing merchants and other retail platforms from turning lower costs into lower prices. The FTC also analyzed “online marketplace platform services” as a relevant market directed at sellers. [13]—to date, this remains the FTC’s allegations, not the unlawful facts finally confirmed by a court.
This is how the FTC does the accounting:
Suppose platform A’s overall charge is 15%, while platform B’s is only 8%.
If a merchant wants the final transaction to be 85 yuan, then on platform A it needs to price at 100 yuan, while on platform B it only needs to price at around 92 yuan. If consumers see B as cheaper, they will go to B. As B gains more transactions, A faces pressure to lower its fees or increase the value of its services.
The market sets the price for platform services through exactly this kind of mechanism.
But if once a merchant sells for 92 on B, it would get serious exposure or a sales-eligibility penalty on A, then a rational merchant might decide to have B also sell for 100.
The result is subtle.
Platform A did not forbid the existence of platform B, nor did it require platform B to charge a particular amount. But B’s cost advantage created by lowering fees cannot be smoothly converted into a price advantage that consumers can see.
The FTC believes that these kinds of mechanisms may both hinder other channels from lowering retail prices and prevent competitive platforms from using low costs to win sellers and consumers. [13]
Amazon asked the court to dismiss the federal antitrust core claims, but in 2024 the Western District of Washington rejected that request, keeping the case moving into evidence and trial. As of spring 2026, the FTC says the fact-finding stage before trial is complete, and the case is scheduled to begin in March 2027. [15]
So we still can’t say the U.S. has drawn the final boundary for this issue yet.
On the contrary, it shows that in network retail, whether the same kind of platform conduct is a normal rule for maintaining transaction quality or is instead using market power to cut off cross-platform price competition still needs to be accounted for in court.
Six
Putting these cases together reveals that in Europe and the United States, platform regulation doesn’t actually follow a simple logic of “all large platforms must be regulated.”
A platform being large is not enough by itself as a reason for regulation.
Platform profits are high, but that alone is not enough to justify regulation.
Merchants complain that fees are too high, but that still is not enough by itself to justify regulation.
Many traditional companies exit the market because of new platform business models, which also cannot automatically prove that competition has been harmed. The competition system already allows more efficient new business models to replace less efficient old ones.
What’s really worth paying attention to is something else:
Does the market still have the ability to constrain the platform in return?
This kind of capability includes at least several layers:
Can merchants convert the savings from a lower-cost channel into a lower price for the goods?
Can merchants tell consumers the true costs that different channels impose on them?
Can merchants operate on two, or even more, platforms at the same time?
If a new platform offers lower fees or better services, can it convert that advantage into lower prices, more traffic, and market share?
If all those mechanisms exist, then even if the platform charges high fees, it still cannot prove that regulation requires intervention. It might simply be a provider of expensive but valuable services.
Even though consumers know it’s cheaper elsewhere, they still choose it; even though merchants know other platforms charge less, they are still willing to stay. As long as these choices are real and actionable, the market is working.
The problem arises when the platform uses its existing scale to weaken that choice itself through price parity, anti-steering, exclusive agreements, loyalty arrangements, ranking, or other mechanisms.
That is also why the most sophisticated way competition policy handles this is often not to directly set a “reasonable take rate” for the platform.
Regulators actually find it hard to know whether a platform should charge 5%, 10%, or 20%.
A platform that charges 15% might provide services worth 20%. A platform that charges only 5% might also rely on exclusionary mechanisms to prevent a competitor that would otherwise need only 3% to enter.
If the government were to directly determine a platform’s reasonable price, it would mean that the regulator starts to replace the market in setting prices. This is clearly not market economics.
So in the Booking case, the regulator did not decide what the hotel’s “reasonable” commission to Booking should be. Instead, it required the market to retain room for the hotel to compete on prices through other sales channels.
In the Surescripts case, the government did not come in to calculate a reasonable profit margin for the electronic prescription network. Instead, it reduced the platform’s ability to hinder customers from using competing platforms through exclusionary arrangements.
The FTC’s allegations against Amazon likewise do not directly dictate how much the platform should charge. Instead, it argues that other competing platforms have the possibility to translate their cost advantages into price advantages.
The American Express case also looks at the issue from another angle: regulators cannot skip over the platform’s other-side gains and the overall competitive effects in the market (including consumer welfare) just because merchants bear higher costs, and then simply declare that the market has been harmed.
The principle that these cases ultimately point to is actually the same:
The goal of competition policy is not to have the government price the platform, but to allow the market to retain as much capacity as possible to price the platform.
Therefore, whether a regulation aimed at a platform is successful cannot be judged only by whether the platform’s fees have decreased, whether merchants’ profits have increased, or even whether the prices consumers pay right now have decreased. So this is not a matter of taking sides.
A stricter standard should be: after intervention, are merchants more likely to choose channels? Are consumers more likely to see the true costs of different channels? Is it easier for a new platform to win deals by relying on lower costs or better services? And does the incumbent platform still have sufficient motivation to keep investing in services that genuinely create transaction value—such as search, credit, payment, and others?
If all these conditions exist, and yet a platform ultimately maintains very high fees, profits, and market share, it could also very well be the result of orderly competition.
Market power certainly exists.
The boundary that truly needs to be drawn is never about how big a platform can be or how much money it can make. It’s about whether it can use the market power it has already obtained to gradually weaken the market’s ability to constrain it.
Seven
A platform cannot be the market itself.
Defending market economics doesn’t necessarily mean defending platforms on par.
— First release — Nitrogen Scrap Collection —
Note
[1] A review by the U.S. Department of Justice of the definitions and distinctions between “market power” and “monopoly power” in the relevant U.S. Supreme Court cases. In those cited precedents, market power is broadly summarized as a firm’s ability to raise prices above competitive market levels, while monopoly power is typically described as the ability to control prices or exclude competition; meanwhile, U.S. antitrust law does not automatically find illegality merely because a firm obtains market power by relying on a better product, business capabilities, and the like. U.S. Department of Justice, Monopoly Power and Market Power in Antitrust Law. https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/monopoly-power-and-market-power-antitrust-law
[2] Bundeskartellamt, Booking.com decision and press release of 23 December 2015. The document explains why, after Booking shifted from “broad best price clauses” to “narrow best price clauses,” regulators still believed the latter restricts price competition among hotels’ own network sales channels. Bundeskartellamt, Narrow “best price” clauses of Booking also anticompetitive, 23 December 2015. https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Meldung/EN/Pressemitteilungen/2015/23_12_2015_Booking.com.html
[3] English version of the German Federal Court of Justice decision of 18 May 2021 in the Booking.com case. The judgment overturned the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court’s earlier ruling, confirming the German Federal Cartel Office’s decision regarding narrow price parity clauses. The German competition authority had also conducted an investigation into the market effects after取消 parity clauses. Federal Court of Justice, Decision of 18 May 2021, KVR 54/20. https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Publikation/EN/Others/BGH_Entscheidung_Booking_EN.pdf Bundeskartellamt, Competition and Consumer Protection in the Digital Economy: Effects of Narrow Price Parity Clauses. https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Meldung/EN/AktuelleMeldungen/2020/27_08_2020_Schriftenreihe_Digitales_7.html
[4] Court of Justice of the European Union, Case C-264/23, Judgment of 19 September 2024. The court held that both broad and narrow parity clause principles generally cannot be classified as “ancillary restraints” that are necessary for Booking’s platform business; it also recognized that online hotel booking platforms can deliver significant efficiencies for consumers and accommodation service providers. Court of Justice of the European Union, Case C-264/23,Booking.comandBooking.com(Deutschland), Judgment of 19 September 2024. https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2024-09/cp240145en.pdf https://infocuria.curia.europa.eu/tabs/redirect/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=290211&doclang=EN
[5] On 13 May 2024, Booking was designated by the European Commission as a “gatekeeper” under the Digital Markets Act. Booking.com’s online intermediation services began bearing DMA-related compliance obligations as of 14 November 2024. European Commission, Annual Report on the Digital Markets Act 2024. https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/document/download/8ed232e8-a674-4434-a13e-8712ea42b0f5_en
[6] (Digital Markets Act) Article 5(3) prohibits gatekeepers from preventing business users from offering the same goods or services to end users at different prices or terms through other online intermediaries or their own direct sales channels. A 2026 DMA assessment document by the European Commission notes that removing specific contractual parity clauses has expanded business users’ room to set prices independently. Regulation (EU) 2022/1925, Digital Markets Act, Article 5(3). https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32022R1925 European Commission, Commission Staff Working Document on the Review of the Digital Markets Act, 28 April 2026. https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/document/download/788ff6d9-f0bf-47d2-80a8-611d5ee5bc51_en
[7] The Department of Justice’s official statement since 2010 suing American Express, Visa, and Mastercard. Visa and Mastercard both reached a proposed settlement with the government to allow merchants to guide consumers to payment instruments with lower costs through discounts, rewards, expressing preferences, and disclosing costs; American Express chose to continue the lawsuit. U.S. Department of Justice, Justice Department Sues American Express, MasterCard and Visa to Eliminate Rules Restricting Price Competition, 4 October 2010. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-american-express-mastercard-and-visa-eliminate-rules-restricting
[8] A 2015 decision by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The court found that American Express’s anti-steering rules weakened price competition between credit card networks and produced actual anticompetitive effects. U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, United States et al. v. American Express Co. et al., Decision, 19 February 2015. https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/485746/dl
[9] U.S. Supreme Court, Ohio v. American Express Co., 25 June 2018, 585 U.S. 529 (2018), decided 5–4. The majority opinion found that credit cards are a special two-sided transaction platform, and the plaintiffs did not prove that the relevant two-sided market as a whole produced anticompetitive effects; the dissent strongly disagreed with both the definition of that market and the proof requirements. Supreme Court of the United States,Ohio et al. v. American Express Co. et al., No. 16-1454. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-1454_5h26.pdf
[10] In 2019, the FTC sued Surescripts, alleging that in two relevant electronic prescription routing and eligibility markets it had long maintained roughly a 95% share and used loyalty, exclusive arrangements, and other measures to block customers from “multihoming,” that is, using competing networks at the same time. Federal Trade Commission, Surescripts case materials. https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/141-0210-surescripts-llc
[11] In March 2023, the U.S. district court granted the FTC summary judgment on part of the case. Later that year, the parties reached a settlement, and on August 9 the court approved the final order. The order explicitly records that Surescripts did not admit or deny the factual allegations in the FTC’s complaint. Therefore, this article refers to it as the “settlement restrictions,” not as a complete finding of all unlawful facts after a full trial. FTC, FTC Reaches Proposed Settlement with Surescripts in Illegal Monopolization Case, 27 July 2023. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/07/ftc-reaches-proposed-settlement-surescripts-illegal-monopolization-case U.S. District Court, Stipulated Order, 9 August 2023. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/surescriptsstipulatedorder.pdf
[12] In its 2026 review of the Surescripts case, the FTC explained that the final order forbade the company from adopting exclusive or loyalty contracts that required customers to direct 50% or more of their transaction volume to Surescripts, and limited other contractual arrangements that impeded customers from trading with competitors. Federal Trade Commission, How Loyalty Discounts Between Firms Harm Competition When There Are Network Effects: FTC v. Surescripts, 13 February 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/competition-matters/2026/02/how-loyalty-discounts-between-firms-harm-competition-when-there-are-network-effects-ftc-v-surescripts
[13] In 2023, the FTC and multiple states brought an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. In the FTC’s case, “anti-discounting measures” were listed as one of the central allegations, with the view that the relevant mechanisms would punish sellers, prevent other online retail channels from offering prices lower than Amazon’s, and prevent competing platforms from gaining scale. The quote here is the plaintiffs’ allegations, not the final court’s factual findings. Federal Trade Commission, FTC Sues Amazon for Illegally Maintaining Monopoly Power, 26 September 2023. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/ftc-sues-amazon-illegally-maintaining-monopoly-power FTC, Amazon eCommerce case page. https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/1910129-1910130-amazoncom-inc-amazon-ecommerce
[14] On 30 September 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington denied Amazon’s motion to dismiss the FTC’s federal antitrust core claims, but allowed certain state-law claims to exit the case. Denying a motion to dismiss means the allegations are sufficient to continue in the litigation process; it does not mean the court has finally determined that the FTC’s factual claims are true. FTC case docket, Order on Motions to Dismiss, 30 September 2024, see the FTC Amazon eCommerce case materials page: https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/1910129-1910130-amazoncom-inc-amazon-ecommerce
[15] As of April 2026, testimony submitted by the FTC to the U.S. Congress states that the pretrial fact findings in the Amazon case are complete, and the trial is planned to begin in March 2027 in the Western District of Washington federal court. Federal Trade Commission, Congressional Testimony, 15 April 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/p994811-ftc-oversight-testimony-senate-commerce-committee-2026.pdf