Jeff Bezos made his fortune with one really huge concept: What if a retailer did the whole lot doable to make clients glad?

His forcefully nurtured creation, Amazon, bought as many gadgets as doable as cheaply as doable and delivered them as rapidly as doable. The result’s that $40 out of each $100 spent on-line in the US goes to Amazon and Mr. Bezos is price $150 billion.

Lina Khan made her popularity with a really completely different concept: What if pleasing the client was not sufficient?

Low costs, she argued in a 95-page examination of Amazon within the Yale Legislation Journal, can masks habits that stifles competitors and undermines society. Revealed in 2017 whereas she was nonetheless a legislation scholar, it’s already some of the consequential tutorial papers of recent instances.

These two very completely different philosophies, every pushed by an outsider unafraid of taking dangers, finally have their much-anticipated confrontation. The Federal Commerce Fee, now run by Ms. Khan after her gorgeous rise from coverage wonk to coverage participant, on Tuesday filed go well with towards Amazon in federal court docket in Seattle. The go well with accused Amazon of being a monopolist that used unfair and unlawful techniques to take care of its energy. Amazon stated the go well with was “mistaken on the details and the legislation.”

Mr. Bezos, 59, is now not in command of Amazon on a day-to-day foundation. He surrendered the chief govt reins to Andy Jassy two years in the past. However make no mistake: Mr. Bezos is Amazon’s govt chair and owns extra of the corporate than anybody else. It’s his improvements, carried out over greater than 20 years, that Ms. Khan is difficult. The F.T.C. criticism quotes him repeatedly.

Silicon Valley spent the summer time transfixed by the prospect of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg actually combating one another, regardless of the chances of this really occurring being close to zero. Ms. Khan and Mr. Bezos are, nonetheless, the true factor — a courtroom conflict that would have implications far past Amazon’s 1.5 million workers, 300 million clients and $1.3 trillion valuation.

If Ms. Khan’s arguments maintain sway, the aggressive panorama for tech firms will look very completely different going ahead. Huge antitrust circumstances are likely to have that impact. The federal government achieved solely a muddled victory in its pursuit of Microsoft 25 years in the past. But that also had sufficient power to distract and weaken a much-feared software program empire, permitting 1,000 start-ups to bloom, together with Amazon.

It’s due largely to Ms. Khan, 34, that imposing main modifications on the retailer is even thinkable. After spending just a few days interviewing her and people round her for a profile in 2018, I assumed she understood Mr. Bezos as a result of she was a lot like him. Only a few folks can see potentialities unseen by others and efficiently work towards them for years, getting others to hitch alongside the way in which. However these had been attributes they each shared.

“How does change occur in historical past?” requested Stacy Mitchell, an early Khan ally who’s co-executive director on the Institute for Native Self-Reliance, a analysis and advocacy group that promotes native energy to struggle companies. “Lina has captured imaginations in a means that has enabled the reform motion to have interaction a wider set of individuals.”

Ms. Khan and Mr. Bezos had been even related of their silence. For years, each article about Amazon featured the road “Amazon declined to remark,” one other type of management. Ms. Khan likewise by no means willingly surrendered to me a bit of private knowledge, even when it was inconsequential.

Amazon and the F.T.C. declined to remark for this text.

Mr. Bezos’ unlikely saga way back entered the realm of delusion. He spent his childhood summers on his grandfather’s West Texas ranch, needed to be a theoretical physicist however turned a Wall Avenue analyst as an alternative. He had no retailing background. He was excited about concepts, not issues.

Amazon was not the primary on-line retailer — it wasn’t even the primary on-line bookstore. It spent plenty of cash foolishly and drove many workers mercilessly. The entire enterprise almost failed within the dot-com crash within the early 2000s. However the media was fascinated by it, clients appreciated it, and that gave Mr. Bezos room to run.

A former Amazon engineer as soon as memorably described Mr. Bezos as making “abnormal management freaks appear like stoned hippies.” An organization that places “attendance reminder” indicators in rest room stalls telling warehouse employees they are going to be “reviewed for termination” in the event that they screw up their time holding is an organization with overwhelming ambition.

Reformers are identical to entrepreneurs: They too are combating towards actuality, attempting to carve out area for his or her imaginative and prescient of how issues might be higher. Ms. Khan’s journey to confronting Amazon in federal court docket is in some methods an excellent much less seemingly story than Mr. Bezos’s. And so, like Mr. Bezos within the early years of Amazon, she has change into a determine of fascination.

The daughter of Pakistani immigrants by the use of London, Ms. Khan had the pure instincts of a great journalist. At Williams School, the place she labored on the varsity paper, a buddy described her as particularly excited about understanding energy, significantly the way in which it conceals itself to grab extra energy. She was in her late 20s when she wrote her paper on Amazon — about Mr. Bezos’s age when he give up his Wall Avenue job to drive along with his spouse on the time, MacKenzie Scott, west to Seattle and his future.

Antitrust legislation was the standard device used to rein in firms that turned too highly effective. Antitrust performed a serious position within the Eighteen Nineties, marking the start of the Progressive Period, and once more within the Nineteen Thirties below the New Deal. However by the early Eighties, antitrust was at a low ebb. The so-called shopper welfare customary decreased antitrust down to 1 concern: the value clients paid. If costs had been low, there was no downside.

The Microsoft case was vital and influential, nevertheless it was very a lot an aberration. Within the early years of this century, the prevailing laissez-faire philosophy allowed not simply Amazon however different start-ups to rise a lot faster than they may in any other case have. Fb and Google charged customers nothing, and had been allowed to amass their technique to dominance. Six of the eight most beneficial U.S. firms are tech firms — seven if you happen to take into account Tesla a tech agency.

Authorities was sluggish; Silicon Valley was quick. {The marketplace} would resolve the destiny of company empires. By 2015, when Ms. Khan was getting into legislation college, hardly anybody was excited about selling competitors by way of authorities intervention. Prison justice reform, environmental legislation, immigration — these had been the matters that appealed to college students. She selected antitrust, virtually alone.

Anybody with a radical concept in Washington faces so many obstacles that it isn’t stunning it occurs so hardly ever. When Ms. Khan was nominated to be chair of the F.T.C. in 2021, Amazon complained that she was biased.

“She has on quite a few events argued that Amazon is responsible of antitrust violations and needs to be damaged up,” the corporate wrote in a 25-page petition to have Ms. Khan recused from any judgment on it.

The logic: If you’re crucial of an organization, you possibly can’t be allowed wherever close to it as a regulator. Ms. Khan survived this problem nevertheless it was solely the primary. To go towards the live-and-let-live angle of many bureaucrats, a relentless willpower is required.

A hostile media is one other hurdle. Dozens of Wall Avenue Journal editorials, opinion essays and letters to the editor have criticized Ms. Khan over the past two years. They known as for Congress to analyze her, argued she didn’t perceive that monopolies had been really good and accused her of letting folks die by blocking a drug firm merger.

Then there may be the lobbying. Amazon spent $10 million within the first half of this 12 months, 5 instances the 2013 degree. It gave cash to tons of of commerce associations and nonprofits in 2022, a few of which concern pro-Amazon reviews with out publicizing their funding. Beneath the “know your enemy” philosophy, Amazon has additionally been staffing up with Ms. Khan’s former F.T.C. colleagues.

Attending to court docket provides little aid. Effectively-steeped in many years of the buyer welfare customary, judges aren’t significantly encouraging to Ms. Khan’s arguments. Circumstances towards Meta, Fb’s mum or dad firm, and extra lately Microsoft have faltered. The Amazon case incorporates facets of the buyer welfare customary, which could make it extra palatable in court docket.

It’s a formidable quantity of opposition. Even a few of her ideological foes are impressed that Ms. Khan is nonetheless having such an affect. By sheer power of mind, she is opening up a dialog about how firms are allowed to behave.

“5 years in the past, you’ll have been laughed out of the room if you happen to challenged the buyer welfare customary,” stated Konstantin Medvedovsky, a former antitrust lawyer who’s now a hedge fund analyst. “Now critical folks make that argument at main conferences and are taken severely. That’s Lina’s triumph.”

Mr. Medvedovsky isn’t very sympathetic to Ms. Khan’s enforcement agenda. He was one of many critics who derided the reform motion as “hipster” antitrust. Nonetheless, he stated, “It’s arduous to not be considerably in awe.”