Dear Friends,

Just a brief note from the Open Markets team to encourage you to watch the Feb. 18 episode of the PBS documentary series Frontline, which is titled “Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos.” The Open Markets team worked closely with Frontline in preparing the documentary, and we believe it will provide a strong case for why the time has come for Americans to break the corporation’s immense and continuously growing economic and political power.

Since 2010, Open Markets has led efforts to shine a light on Amazon’s dangerous monopoly power, as well as on the tools we have to fix the problem. These efforts include hosting the first private discussion among top editors and publishers, in February 2010, at the American Booksellers Association Winter Institute. It includes writing the first mainstream media article about Amazon’s threat to book authors and book publishers, in Harpers in 2012, called “Killing the Competition.” It includes working with Authors United in detailing how Amazon grossly abused this power by suppressing the work of the book publisher Hachette in 2015, as detailed in this article in The New York Times. It includes hosting in January 2016 the first public discussion of the need to break up Amazon. And it includes Lina Khan’s well-known article “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” in the January 2017 issue of the Yale Law Journal.

PBS will broadcast the episode at 9 p.m. Eastern/6 p.m. Pacific on Tuesday, Feb. 18.

Watch the trailer on PBS or YouTube.

Read the PBS press release about the episode here.