MONTH XX, 2026

The Honorable Andrew Ferguson
Federal Trade Commission
306 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

Re: Small businesses support FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon

Dear Chair Ferguson,

We urge you to carry the joint antitrust case against Amazon through to trial and pursue remedies strong enough to restore real competition. The outcome of this case will determine whether independent businesses have a viable path to market on fair terms in the years ahead. It will determine whether the online market remains choked by a single gatekeeper or becomes an open, dynamic arena in which independent businesses can compete, innovate, and grow.

We represent a nationwide coalition of independent business associations spanning booksellers, hardware stores, toy sellers, office supply dealers, sporting goods stores, pharmacies, clothing stores, restaurants, florists, farmers, fisherman, manufacturers, and grocery stores, as well as local multi-industry business associations representing diverse products and services. Our members have long experienced firsthand the practices at issue in this case — many of which were also documented in the House Judiciary Committee’s bipartisan investigation into Amazon in 2021 —.and we are united in calling for strong antitrust enforcement to restore a level playing field for independent businesses.

Amazon's dominance is restructuring the economy in ways that devastate independent businesses. Its strategy is to control the infrastructure that commerce depends on. Today, it captures roughly half of online spending. This means that many independent businesses have little choice but to rely on its platform to reach customers, while others suffer limited market access if they forgo it. That control has real consequences on Main Street. Between 2007 and 2022, the number of independent retailers fell by nearly 70,000, roughly 40 percent of the nation's small apparel, toy, and sporting goods makers disappeared.

These are not casualties of fair competition. They are the predictable result of a monopoly gatekeeper that tilts the playing field against any business that dares to compete with it. Communities that lose independent retailers don't just lose stores — they lose jobs, local tax revenue, and the benefits of dollars recirculating locally.

The competitive conditions this lawsuit seeks to address are deteriorating in real time. Amazon has deepened its control over online retail, logistics, and the emerging infrastructure of AI-driven commerce. Independent businesses face a stark choice: accept being locked out of the rapidly growing online market, or attempt to operate under exorbitant fees, coercive terms, opaque algorithmic manipulation, and the appropriation of their data to compete against them.

Since the case was filed in 2023, Amazon has continued to develop new tactics to tighten its control and has intensified old ones. Its ever-changing algorithms pressure sellers to buy more ads or lose the "Buy Box." Arbitrary account deactivations cut off revenue overnight with no recourse. Most recently, Amazon's "Buy For Me" AI program has begun scraping independent business websites without consent, inserting Amazon as an intermediary into transactions that previously occurred outside its platform.

The result is a hardening of the online economy. Independent businesses are being squeezed out, while consumers face higher prices, fewer choices, and a marketplace engineered to sustain the power of a single firm.

Conduct remedies cannot fix a structural monopoly. As the lawsuit recognizes, each element of Amazon's strategy amplifies the others, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of dominance. Only structural intervention can restore competitive conditions.

These issues deserve to be aired fully and publicly at trial. The American people — and the small businesses that anchor communities across this country — deserve to see the full scope of this conduct examined and adjudicated.

The online market should offer America's small businesses, in the lawsuit's own words, "a wide-open frontier where anyone with a good idea would have a fair shot at success." That vision is slipping away. We urge the Commission and the states’ attorneys general to see this case through.