Last month, a judge ordered the Federal Trade Commission to do something surprisingly basic: explain what it actually wants.
After years of investigation and a sweeping antitrust complaint against Amazon, the agency has now been forced to delineate the remedies it is seeking. That may sound procedural. It isn’t. It goes to the heart of whether modern antitrust enforcement is effective at protecting competition and consumers.
The remedies phase is where antitrust either becomes meaningful policy or collapses.
There’s growing recognition, that enforcement needs to be remedies-centered. It’s not enough to allege harm. To achieve antitrust’s goal of protecting competition, you really need two things: one to show that a firm is engaging in anticompetitive conduct, and a path forward to address the conduct and restore competition.
This sounds obvious. But in practice, it’s where current enforcement is breaking down.
The issue came into focus during the remedy phase of the government’s case against Google. Even after the court found certain exclusive default agreements to be anticompetitive, there was no consensus on what to do next. Experts still disagreed over whether Google was dominant because of contracts, or because users genuinely preferred its product.
That distinction matters. A lot.
Yet among the remedies floated was something far more aggressive than targeting contracts: a potential breakup, including divestiture of Android. Such proposals would go beyond specific conduct of the case and towards a structural reset of an entire ecosystem. In other words, enforcement leapt from “this practice may be problematic” to “dismantle the firm’s architecture” without a clearly articulated bridge between the two.
Which brings us back to Amazon—and the FTC’s current dilemma.
The agency has spent years building a case that Amazon penalizes sellers for pricing lower on other sites, ties services together (specifically shipping), and leverages its marketplace to reinforce dominance.
But when pressed on remedies, the picture gets fuzzy. It’s still unclear whether the agency proposes a ban certain seller agreement, restricting self-preferencing, or a structural breakup. These are not interchangeable solutions. They rest on entirely different theories of harm, and ultimately determine the merits of pursuing this case.
There’s a literary analogy here that’s hard to ignore.
The FTC’s approach increasingly resembles Captain Ahab’s pursuit in Moby-Dick. For former Chair Lina Khan and her intellectual allies, Amazon has long functioned as the case study for why modern antitrust needs to be rethought from the ground up.
But identifying a white whale is not the same as knowing how to catch it. And catching it is not the same as knowing what to do with it once you have.
Right now, the FTC seems stuck in that gap. This isn’t just a procedural hiccup. It’s a structural problem for antitrust enforcement. The court’s order forcing the FTC to specify remedies shouldn’t be controversial—it should be standard practice.
Because without a concrete answer of how they would address alleged harms, antitrust stops being about protecting competition and starts looking like a theory in search of an outcome.
Tirzah Duren is the President and CEO of the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. Follow Tirzah on X @tzduren.