0:19 JON STEWART: You run the Federal Trade Commission.
0:24 That’s right.
0:25 JON STEWART: The whole shebang. And you are in charge of-- it’s protecting Americans from monopolistic company practices, but also dealing with pricing and things like that, protecting consumers.
0:38 That’s right. I mean, the short of it is we want to make sure that the American public is not getting bullied or coerced in the marketplace or tricked. And so we enforce the nation’s antitrust and consumer protection laws.
0:50 JON STEWART: And how is-- well, please.
0:52 [CHEERING]
0:55 JON STEWART: Now, I just want to make very clear that you were not bullied or tricked into applauding, no? I don’t want to be accused of monopolistic–
1:05 JON STEWART: how much pressure do these companies exert on the Federal Trade Commission? In other words, how much do they fight whatever regulation you’re trying to put into place to keep them rom becoming monopolies or from these types of business practices?
1:21 Well, look, monopolies are not fans of enforcing the anti-monopoly laws. And so that type of pushback is baked in. But we have a fantastic team. We’re a small agency, but we’re mighty. And we play to our strengths-- being entrepreneurial, being strategic, and getting real wins for the American people.
1:42 JON STEWART: So, these are separate things. Monopolies, the way I always viewed it was, oh, that’s only one company. But don’t we have oligopolies in this country? Consolidation has made it-- for instance, the entertainment industry is controlled by like six companies. Is that considered not a monopoly, but a problem?
2:02 Yeah, look, we’ve really focused on how are companies behaving? Are they’re behaving in ways that suggest they can harm their customers, harm their suppliers, harm their workers, and get away with it? And that type of too-big-to-care-type approach is really what ends up signaling that a company has monopoly power because they can start mistreating you, but they know you’re stuck.
2:26 JON STEWART: And what would be the metrics of that? How would you judge that? Because I know you’ve sued Amazon.
2:31 That’s right.
2:32 JON STEWART: And that’s for those practices?
2:35 [CHEERING]
2:39 So our lawsuit does allege that Amazon is a monopoly, that they’ve maintained that monopoly through illegal practices. And, look, there are a variety of ways that you can show a company is a monopoly and has monopoly power. One is you can try to figure out, what’s the exact boundary of the market? What’s the market share? But, again, the most direct way is to look at, how is the company behaving?
3:02 And as we lay out in our complaint, Amazon is now able to get away with harming its customers. So just to give you a few examples.
3:09 JON STEWART: Yes.
3:10 Over the last few years, they’ve littered their search results page with junk ads, ads that internally executives realize are irrelevant and unhelpful to consumers, but they can just do it and it milks them billions of dollars in money.
3:25 They’ve also been steadily hiking the fees that small businesses have to pay to sell through Amazon. And so now some small businesses have to pay one out of every two dollars to Amazon. It’s basically a 50% monopoly tax.
3:40 JON STEWART: Wow.
3:41 And so those are just some of the behaviors that we point to note that this company has monopoly power.
3:46 JON STEWART: Is there anything in the company’s leader that also suggests that? For instance, if you were to go from being like sort of a nerdy dude who sold books out of a garage into, let’s say, a jacked Lex Luther type, does that also suggest either monopolistic practices or some type of injections?
4:13 You know, we haven’t tried to make those arguments in court, but it would be interesting to see how a judge would respond.
4:20 JON STEWART: I think quite favorably.
4:25 JON STEWART: For instance, so what are you up against? So you’ve got government lawyers. I’m assuming you’ve got a pretty good cadre of them. But let’s say you’re going after Amazon. How many lawyers do they have?
4:34 I mean, you know, if they have monopoly money, they can buy as many lawyers as they want. I mean, the FTC is around 1,200 employees. But when we’re going up against some of these monopolistic companies, they can outmatch us, outgun us sometimes 1 to 10 just if you’re looking at lawyers. If you’re adding paralegals and support staff–
4:53 JON STEWART: If you’re just looking at lawyers, they outnumber you 10 to 1?
4:56 Sometimes they can, yeah. I mean, we have lawsuits against a whole bunch of big companies. And just in terms of sheer resources that they can pour into the litigation, we’re pretty outgunned, but not outmatched, right? And this is where it comes to playing to your strengths, being entrepreneurial.
5:14 JON STEWART: So this isn’t about just getting a fine. This isn’t about going after Amazon and saying, so–because this is what the SEC does. The SEC I think is overmatched as a government agency. And you don’t have to comment on that, but just nod your head…
5:25 [LAUGHTER]
5:26 JON STEWART: Utterly overmatched, so they go after groups. And then they can’t really prove it in court. So then they’re like, how about this? You give us a cut of your profit and we’ll all be done here. How do you handle that with Amazon? It’s not just about a fine.
5:39 That’s right. I think we’ve seen, look, over the last couple of decades, we’ve seen how businesses can treat fines just as a cost of doing business. And we need to make sure that we’re actually deterring illegal behavior.
5:52 And so that can mean naming individual executives. We in some of our lawsuits–
5:58 JON STEWART: Oh, snap, you just did not go there. I like that.
