Karl Racine

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Hoo boy, this is a moment. A government authority in the United States has sued Amazon over claims that the company is breaking the law by unfairly crushing competition.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by the attorney general for the District of Columbia, joins the recent government antitrust cases against Google and Facebook. These lawsuits will take forever, and legal experts have said that the companies likely have the upper hand in court.

The D.C. attorney general, Karl Racine, however, is making a legal argument against Amazon that is both old-school and novel, and it might become a blueprint for crimping Big Tech power.

It’s a longstanding claim by some of the independent merchants who sell on Amazon’s digital mall that the company punishes them if they list their products for less on their own websites or other shopping sites like Walmart.com. Those sellers are effectively saying that Amazon dictates what happens on shopping sites all over the internet, and in doing so makes products more expensive for all of us.

told me that he believed that those price claims were the strongest potential antitrust case against Amazon on legal grounds. (He has since been picked to advise the White House on corporate competition issues.)

I don’t know if any of these lawsuits against Big Tech will succeed at chipping away at the companies’ tremendous influence. And I can’t definitively say whether we’re better or worse off by having a handful of powerful technology companies that make products used and often loved by billions of people.

the price of power is scrutiny.

How to fight back against bogus online information: The comedian Sarah Silverman and three of my colleagues are hosting a virtual event Wednesday about disinformation and how to combat it. Sign up here for the online event at 7 p.m. Eastern. It’s open only to New York Times subscribers.

fine social media companies for permanently barring political candidates’ accounts. The measure is most likely unconstitutional and unenforceable, Democrats, libertarian groups and tech companies told my colleague David McCabe, but it’s a response to Facebook’s and Twitter’s suspension of former President Donald Trump.

Hugs to this

The Linda Lindas are glorious. Here is the talented punk band of four girls between the ages of 10 and 16 — Bela, Eloise, Mila and Lucia — playing “Racist, Sexist Boy” at a Los Angeles public library. The Guardian interviewed them about their sudden internet fame.

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The District of Columbia sued Amazon on Tuesday, accusing it of artificially raising prices for products in its ubiquitous online marketplace and around the web by abusing its monopoly power, a sign that regulators in the United States are increasingly turning their attention to the company’s dominance across the economy.

In the lawsuit, the D.C. government said that Amazon had effectively prohibited merchants that use its platform from charging lower prices for the same products elsewhere online. That, in turn, raised prices for those products not just on Amazon’s website but in other marketplaces as well, it said.

“Amazon has used its dominant position in the online retail market to win at all costs,” said Karl Racine, the attorney general for the District of Columbia. “It maximizes its profits at the expense of third-party sellers and consumers, while harming competition, stifling innovation, and illegally tilting the playing field in its favor.”

Jodi Seth, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said in a statement that Mr. Racine “has it exactly backwards — sellers set their own prices for the products they offer in our store.” She added that Amazon reserved the right “not to highlight offers to customers that are not priced competitively.”

others raise their prices elsewhere or choose to list solely on Amazon, the largest e-commerce site in the country, to avoid losing their listings. The complaint said “Walmart routinely fields requests from merchants to raise prices on Walmart’s online retail sales platform because the merchants worry that a lower price on Walmart will jeopardize their status on Amazon.”

Absent the policing, sellers “would be able to sell their products on their own or other online retail sales platforms for less than they sell them on Amazon’s platform,” it said.

“Most favored nation” contracts are common across industries, including the cable industry with media business partners. Mr. Racine’s office will have to prove how the price agreements harmed other sellers and were anticompetitive.