Other regulators and lawmakers are more measured in their proposals and their rhetoric, but a loose consensus has emerged around a group of concerns, which some people refer to as the Four “C”s. The first is concentration. A high-ranking F.T.C. official told me, “The bigger a tech company becomes, the more they can bully, so we need to put hard caps on how big companies like that can grow, on what they can acquire.”

Rohit Chopra, one of the F.T.C.’s five commissioners, told me that the second “C” is the conflict of interest that comes from “both controlling the pipe and selling the oil.” Chopra, who agreed to speak only about antitrust generally and not about Amazon specifically, explained, “If you do both, you will structure your marketplace in a way that ultimately is self-dealing, and you will use the data from those who sell on your marketplace to benefit yourself.” There’s a long history of the government forcing industries to separate distribution and sales; for years, movie studios have generally been prohibited from owning movie theatres.

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The next area of concern is contracts. Big tech companies often make highly restrictive deals with smaller venders. Amazon retains a contractual right to hold sellers’ revenues for long periods after a sale, and imposes limits on what data sellers can share with other companies. Another F.T.C. commissioner, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, told me, “There are a lot of terms that go into boilerplate contracts that consumers or workers don’t really have an opportunity to negotiate. It is absolutely appropriate for us to be thinking about banning those.”

Lastly, regulators worry about the complexity of current antitrust law. “You really have to be an expert, or hire an expert attorney, if you feel like one of these companies is acting inappropriately,” an F.T.C. official said. “The law only works when it is simple enough for the little guy to bring an action on their own.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar, the ranking member of the Senate’s subcommittee on antitrust, told me that such reforms are bound by a central idea: “The big tech companies are completely reshaping the way we buy goods and sell goods in the marketplace, our privacy rules, and our democracy rules, without any checks and balances from the government.” She continued, “So many people are finally getting tired of the dominance. When Amazon starts owning Whole Foods, when they control the producers, when they control all the parts of the supply chain—people deserve a level playing field.” American history, Klobuchar said, shows that such imbalances can spark widespread activism. “This goes back to the Founders and the Boston Tea Party,” she said. “These are highly emotional political moments.”

Amazon has responded to the mounting political threat by expanding its lobbying efforts. Federal records indicate that, in 2018, Amazon lobbied more government bodies than any other U.S. tech company. It has made its case across Washington, to senators, representatives, the Treasury Department, the Department of Justice, even NASA. Much of Amazon’s lobbying has been devoted to winning government contracts: it is a leading contender for a ten-billion-dollar project to centralize the Department of Defense’s cloud computing. But a former federal official who works on antitrust issues told me that the company’s other lobbying was “about telling us that, if you even think about breaking up Amazon, you’re going to make markets less efficient, and there are going to be a lot of lost jobs—and Amazon employs a ton of people in your district.”

Amazon has a Twitter account devoted to cheery photographs and videos of lawmakers touring warehouses, posing alongside rows of Amazon trucks, and putting items in boxes. (If the videos are any indication, legislators are permitted to work much more slowly than Amazon productivity standards require.) Such theatrics used to serve the company well. However, a regulator who is familiar with Amazon’s lobbying said that “there’s been a bit of hubris, because, in the past, they were able to tell a story about how consumers love them. But now that’s changing, and it’s very concerning to them.”

According to Amazon insiders, Bezos adamantly refuses to consider slowing the company’s growth, fearing that its culture will break down if the pace slackens. He is determined to defend his creation aggressively. For years, Amazon was largely content to remain silent amid criticism—one Leadership Principle is “We accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time”—but the company now responds to nearly every provocation. In June, after Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on television that Bezos’s wealth is “predicated on paying people starvation wages and stripping them of their ability to access health care,” Amazon’s communications and policy chief, Jay Carney, went on the attack, tweeting, “All our employees get top-tier benefits. I’d urge @AOC to focus on raising the federal minimum wage instead of making stuff up about Amazon.” That month, the Times ran an article accusing the company of “a kind of lawlessness” in its bookstore: counterfeit medical textbooks were for sale, and Amazon seemed unconcerned with “the authenticity, much less the quality, of what it sells.” A long rebuttal appeared on Amazon’s blog, arguing that “nothing could be further from the truth” and accusing the reporter of cherry-picking examples. Last year, Amazon tapped a group of warehouse workers to be a kind of Twitter rapid-response army, deputizing them as “ambassadors.” When a Bernie Sanders supporter tweeted that Amazon was anti-union, a fulfillment-center employee, @AmazonFCJanet, fired back, “Unions are thieves.”

Amazon offered few specifics on its lobbying activities. “There is abundant competition in the retail sector, and many retailers are thriving,” the company wrote in response to questions. “There is no power imbalance between Amazon and the sellers and vendors who work with us.”

Executives at Amazon have argued to regulators and lawmakers that the company is distinct in fundamental ways from Facebook and Google. Whereas those firms essentially created their industries, Amazon’s realm—the retail marketplace—has existed since the dawn of commerce. “The idea that there is only one marketplace is demonstrably false,” the company wrote in a statement, noting that Walmart still brings in more revenue than it does. Amazon executives point out that, if you ignore the distinction between online and real-world sales, Amazon is responsible for about four per cent of U.S. retail transactions. “If we do not compete on prices, selection, delivery speed and customer service, customers will choose other competitors,” the company statement noted.

Part of Amazon’s defensiveness stems from executives’ conviction that regulators’ concerns are based not on logic but on a misguided understanding of retail. One executive told me that the real problem is that Amazon is disproportionately popular among lawmakers. Congressional aides, high-profile journalists, and other élites often use Amazon to buy kitchen supplies and Christmas gifts. They watch “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and shop at Whole Foods. They don’t even know the location of the nearest Walmart, the executive said, and therefore think that Amazon is much more powerful than it really is.

Perhaps it’s true that policymakers would have a broader perspective if they logged more hours at Costco. But, in any case, Amazon now has such a severe image problem that it can no longer count on being able to do whatever it pleases. High-ranking executives allow that there are some limited concessions Bezos is willing to make, such as donating more of his wealth to charity. And Amazon may agree to strengthen its oversight of drivers and of workers’ safety. One executive told me that Amazon is determined to remain open-minded and polite with regulators; one of Microsoft’s missteps in the nineties, he said, was that it was dismissive. But few of the current Amazon executives I spoke with said that the company needed to make major changes. And few believed that regulators would compel them to do so. After all, Amazon employs hundreds of thousands of people across the nation, many of them voters, and has warehouses in dozens of states. A tech lobbyist told me, “Neither Facebook nor Google has that. Sometimes you survive just because there are other targets to absorb the blows.”