Footnote 353

In 2017 the Yale Law Journal published a note called "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox." It argued that a century of American antitrust thinking, built around consumer prices, had no way to see what Amazon was actually doing. The note went on to become the most cited antitrust article of its era. Its author, Lina Khan, later became chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

Footnote 353 reads:

See Will Mitchell, How To Rank Your Products on Amazon—The Ultimate Guide, StartupBros, http://startupbros.com/rank-amazon [http://perma.cc/6X3E-KNHF].

That is a blog post I wrote for sellers.

What it was doing there

The footnote is not decoration. It supports a specific claim in the body of the paper:

sellers who use FBA have a better chance of being listed higher in Amazon search results than those who do not, which means Amazon is tying...

That sentence is the hinge of a real antitrust argument. If Amazon's warehouse service quietly improves your search placement, then Amazon is using dominance in one market to shape outcomes in another. To make that argument stick, you need evidence that the effect is real and that sellers know it is real.

There was no academic paper establishing that. There was no regulatory filing. Amazon has never published its ranking algorithm and has no reason to.

The people who knew were the sellers. And what sellers had written down, at length, with specifics, were guides like mine.

The gap this exposes

I find this more interesting than the name-drop.

Regulators were trying to reason about a company whose mechanics were documented almost entirely by the people it did business with, in places nobody thought of as sources. The gap between what practitioners knew and what the record contained was wide enough that a Yale note had to reach into a marketing blog to close it.

That gap has not gone away. It has moved. Whatever the next Amazon turns out to be, the people who understand its mechanics first will be the ones operating inside it, and most of them will never write any of it down.

I think the lesson runs in both directions. If you work inside a system nobody has mapped, writing down what you actually see is worth more than it feels like at the time. And if you are trying to understand a system from outside it, the useful sources are frequently not the respectable ones.

The second one

Khan cited the same guide again the following year, in a chapter called "Amazon: An Infrastructure Service and Its Challenge to Current Antitrust Law," published by Oxford University Press in the collection Digital Dominance. That one lists me by name in the bibliography.

Two citations, from the same author, in the Yale Law Journal and an Oxford University Press volume, for a post about getting your products to rank.

A note on links

The journal archived the page at perma.cc when it published, which is standard practice for legal citations and exists precisely because the web rots. That turned out to matter. The URL in the footnote, startupbros.com/rank-amazon, is not the URL the article lives at today.

A citation in a published paper is permanent. The author cannot revise it, and no reader following it can be expected to guess. If the link breaks, only one party in the world can fix it, and it is not the person who wrote the footnote. So that redirect is maintained deliberately, along with every other cited URL on the domain, and a scheduled job checks weekly that each one still reaches the article it promised.

The full record of works of mine cited by published scholarship is at /citations.