Amazon Web Services is caught in the antitrust shadow of the Federal Trade Commission

While the Justice Department set its sights on Google's monopolistic actions lawsuit, the FTC is now moving forward with its own lawsuit against Amazon. According to a Bloomberg report, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission will conduct an antitrust investigation into Amazon. However, unlike the EU's focus on competition from resellers, the FTC has set its sights on Amazon's cloud computing business.

The newly appointed FtC director, Lina Khan, will be in charge of the work, and she has been a critic of Amazon for some time. Khan will take over the investigation into Amazon, which has been conducted for years to address concerns about competition from Amazon's web services.

Initially, the investigation into Amazon began under former Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joe Simons of the Trump administration and was affected from the outset over former President Trump's very open opposition to the company.

Perhaps, with more attention, the FTC can now investigate the nature of active discrimination on behalf of AWS when it comes to "software companies that sell their products to AWS customers while competing with AWS."

While there is a claim that Microsoft's Azure business is far behind AWS, according to a recent Gartner report, its actual 20 percent market share may actually make the FTC's lawsuit somewhat difficult, as AWS has a 41 percent share of the market. Fortunately, for its part, the FTC can point to the fact that when something goes wrong with AWS, half of the Internet goes down (in fact, this has happened many times in recent times) as direct evidence of the lack of commercial competition in the market.

Amazon isn't the only target of the FTC's antitrust either. The Trump administration's initial investigation into tech companies' antitrust practices also included headline targets such as Meta's Facebook, Google and Apple, among others.

What investigations she will conduct into the competition and oversight of "big tech" in 2022 and beyond will depend on Khan's decision.