In a few months, Jeff Bezos will step down as CEO of the sprawling empire that he founded nearly 27 years ago, taking on the role of executive chairman. Amazon is the fourth most valuable US company, as of this writing, the second largest US employer, and has had the second best performance of any stock since going public in 1997. More than any other company, it has taught the world to buy things online.

How will we remember the Bezos era? Tech analyst Ben Thompson has called him “arguably the greatest CEO in tech history,” and the financial data backs that up. Harvard Business Review’s CEO rankings put Bezos first in financial performance among S&P 1200 executives every year from 2014 to 2019. (The magazine did not publish a ranking in 2020.) But when it added social and environmental performance to its ranking in 2015, Bezos fell from first to 87th.

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When Jeff Bezos launched Amazon in 1994, his vision wasn’t to sell books, but to chart a path toward commercial dominance. Early employees noted that Bezos’s “underlying goals were [to build] a ‘utility’ that would become essential to commerce.” The legacy of JeffBezos’s success is also the legacy of antitrust enforcers failures; Amazon flourished during an ideological era in which the drive to monopolize markets was, contrary to much of American history, viewed as largely unproblematic.

But Bezos’s unprecedented commercial dominance has also sparked a rapid reawakening among policymakers to the importance of antitrust’s original goals. When Bezos testified in front of Congress last fall, one seller’s story demonstrated the extent of Amazon’s ruthlessness and the human cost of enforcers’ failures:

“We were a top bookseller on Amazon and we worked hard, day and night, toward growing our business…[one that] feeds a total of 14 people…As we grew, we were shrinking Amazon’s market share…So, in retaliation, Amazon started restricting us from selling. They started with a few titles in early 2019 and within six months, Amazon systematically blocked us from selling in the full textbook category. We haven’t sold a single book in the past 10 months.”

Despite sending more than 500 separate communications to Amazon, including to Mr. Bezos directly, the seller received no meaningful response. Mr. Bezos should no longer expect policymakers to treat Amazon with similar neglect.