Amazon's Antitrust Trial Has 17 States — and Not the One It's In
THE WORLD · OCTOBER 4, 2026
The Federal Trade Commission's antitrust case against Amazon is being heard in federal court in Seattle — Amazon's hometown — and the attorney general of Washington State is not one of the plaintiffs. Seventeen other states are. A news item this week still says the bench trial begins October 13; that was the date Judge John Chun set in 2024, and it has since moved twice. It is now scheduled for March 29, 2027.
Both corrections come from the same place, so here is the whole picture in one pass.
Who Is Actually Suing Amazon
The FTC filed FTC v. Amazon on September 26, 2023, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, alleging that Amazon illegally maintains monopoly power in online retail. The agency was joined by the attorneys general of seventeen states: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin. Vermont and Puerto Rico signed on later. Washington is not on either list.
The case rests on the FTC Act and the Sherman Act, and the FTC is asking for a permanent injunction, not damages. It will be tried to the judge alone — that is what "bench trial" means: Judge Chun hears the evidence and decides.
What the Complaint Says Amazon Did
The FTC's complaint centers on two practices, described in its press release at filing:
- Anti-discounting. The agency alleges Amazon punishes sellers who offer lower prices elsewhere by burying their listings in search results, so that a seller who undercuts Amazon on a rival site becomes, in the complaint's words, effectively invisible on Amazon. The claimed effect is higher prices across the internet, not just on Amazon.
- Tying Prime to Amazon's logistics. The agency alleges Amazon makes a seller's eligibility for the Prime badge depend on buying Amazon's own fulfillment service, which pushes sellers into a costlier arrangement and makes it harder to sell through competing channels.
It adds that Amazon fills search results with paid ads and low-quality listings, favors its own products, and collects fees from sellers that can reach up to about half of a seller's revenue once advertising and fulfillment are counted. Those are the FTC's allegations. Amazon contests them, and none of it has been proven.
How the trial date moved. Judge Chun first set the trial for October 13, 2026. Amazon later lost a bid to keep that date, and the court moved it to February 9, 2027. The FTC and Amazon then jointly proposed March 29, 2027, and Judge Chun signed a scheduling order adopting it, with a pretrial conference on March 15 and trial briefs due March 22.
The Washington Question
Washington's absence from the 2023 filing is the part people notice, because the court and the defendant are both in Washington's biggest city. The coverage at the time offered no stated reason. What the record does show is what the office said then and what it had already done on its own.
Then–Attorney General Bob Ferguson said his office was reviewing the complaint and would monitor the litigation, "keeping all options open, including future litigation." And Washington had gone after Amazon pricing without the FTC: in January 2022 his office announced that Amazon would shut down its "Sold by Amazon" program nationwide and pay $2.25 million, after an investigation found the program, which ran from 2018 to 2020, amounted to price-fixing with third-party sellers. So the state was not a bystander to Amazon antitrust; it just wasn't in this case. Why it chose that, the public record doesn't say, and I'd rather leave that blank than fill it with a guess.
Washington has since joined the FTC against Amazon elsewhere. On August 31, 2026, Attorney General Nick Brown announced the state had joined an FTC-led suit, with a bipartisan coalition of other states, over Amazon's advertising business — alleging that Amazon inflated ad prices with undisclosed surcharges while telling advertisers its auctions worked on a "second-price" basis. Washington's claims there are under its own Consumer Protection Act. That is a different case from the monopoly trial, and it is easy to mix the two up, which is part of why the question keeps coming.
What to Watch
Nothing is scheduled to happen at trial until spring of 2027, so the next events are procedural: pretrial filings and the March 15 conference. In 2024 the judge let the FTC's central claims go forward while trimming a few of the states' own claims, which is why the case that reaches trial is narrower than the one filed. If the date moves a third time, it will be in the docket before it is in the headlines — and, as this week showed, sometimes well before the headlines notice.
- Federal Trade Commission. FTC Sues Amazon for Illegally Maintaining Monopoly Power. 26 September 2023. ftc.gov
- CNBC. FTC and 17 states sue Amazon on antitrust charges. 26 September 2023. cnbc.com
- Nasdaq. Federal Judge Sets October 2026 Date for FTC's Antitrust Trial Against Amazon. nasdaq.com
- MLex. US FTC-Amazon antitrust trial rescheduled to February 2027. mlex.com
- MLex. US FTC-Amazon antitrust trial pushed back to March 2027. mlex.com
- KUOW. Why hasn't Washington state joined the federal antitrust case against Amazon? 26 September 2023. kuow.org
- Washington State Office of the Attorney General. AG Ferguson investigation shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide. 26 January 2022. atg.wa.gov
- Washington State Office of the Attorney General. Washington joins FTC lawsuit alleging Amazon inflated ad pricing. 31 August 2026. atg.wa.gov
- Image: Carol M. Highsmith, William Kenzo Nakamura U.S. Courthouse, Seattle, Washington, Library of Congress. Public domain.
