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.

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“Antitrust law doesn’t make it illegal to get market power,” provided it was done properly, said A. Douglas Melamed, a professor of antitrust law at Stanford University and a former U.S. Department of Justice antitrust official.

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Amazon’s humongous size is “politically important,” but not an antitrust issue. “Not if they got there by being more innovative and more creative than the next guy,” he said.

Melamed, the Stanford professor, said that the grocery chain and Amazon today barely compete. Whole Foods, with annual sales of about $16 billion, represents a tiny sliver of the $600 billion U.S. grocery market. And Amazon’s U.S. grocery and pantry sales totaled just $400 million in the first quarter of 2017, according to calculations by One Click Retail, an e-commerce consultancy.

In the longer term, too, Melamed sees a relatively clear runway for Amazon, as long as it behaves.

He acknowledged there is some restlessness among experts regarding the relative passivity of antitrust regulators in recent decades.

“There’s an increasing sentiment, even among the antitrust technocrats, that perhaps antitrust law has not been aggressive enough,” he said. That laxity has allowed, in the eyes of critics, a series of gigantic deals across the U.S. economy that have increased market concentration.

But Melamed expects any regulatory changes that may occur to be relatively minor — perhaps closer scrutiny of upcoming deals, or looking at a longer-term horizon when projecting whether a merger might result in competitive harm.

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Melamed said European regulators don’t like the creation of monopolies, even if they result from disruptive practices that would be considered acceptable in the U.S. “If you wind up driving your only competitor out of business, it’s going to land you in trouble in Europe.”

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