One of the central arguments in the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) antitrust lawsuit against Amazon is that the online retailing giant has stunted the growth of potential competition by forcing small businesses and other independent sellers to funnel their products through Amazon's own in-house distribution system.
Much of that argument seems to hinge on a single statistic—one that top officials at the FTC have cited in interviews and on Twitter and that pops up in a newly unredacted part of the FTC's lawsuit. There's just one problem: that stat doesn't say what the FTC keeps claiming it does.
