© Elaine Thompson/The Associated PressPedestrians walk past a Whole Foods Market just down the street from the headquarters of Amazon in Seattle. Amazon, already a powerhouse in a number of markets, will bind its customers even more closely once it completes its $13.7 billion bid for the organic grocery store Whole Foods.
Amazon.com, America's fifth-largest company by market value, is still growing like an adolescent and planting flags in new markets. That is prompting some policymakers and legal experts to ask: How big is too big?
It's a key issue for an economy being rapidly reshaped by e-commerce, a sector where Amazon and the merchants operating on its platform account for up to a third of all U.S. sales, according to some estimates.
It's also critical for Seattle, a city that has hitched its wagon to the e-commerce titan, and that once saw another local champion, Microsoft, mired in a lengthy antitrust battle.
That fight, over Microsoft keeping a rival internet browser off PCs running Windows, almost led to the split-up of the Redmond software giant.
E-commerce is not Amazon's only game. It also dominates cloud computing, and it may soon have a significant brick-and-mortar presence, with its pending acquisition of Whole Foods Market.
The unexpected $13.7 billion deal announced in June spurred an outcry among critics of the company and some members of Congress who asked the Federal Trade Commission to take a close look at the deal.
Comment: Actually reading Mark Twain would be better for race relations than banning him ever will be. But that kind of common sense doesn't square with the cognitive dissonance caused by a legendary advocate of slavery abolition and women's rights using an offensive word.