Over the last two years, the European Commission (EU) has been investigating Amazon for using the company’s non-public data on its platform to undermine competition. Now that the investigation is wrapping up, the EC is calling this a violation of the EU competition law.
According to the formal antitrust charging document that was recently made public, Amazon uses third-party product sales data on the site to “calibrate Amazon’s retail offers and strategic business decisions to the detriment of the other marketplace sellers.”
Margethe Vestager, the Executive Vice-President in charge of competition said:
“We must ensure that dual role platforms with market power, such as Amazon, do not distort competition. Data on the activity of third party sellers should not be used to the benefit of Amazon when it acts as a competitor to these sellers. The conditions of competition on the Amazon platform must also be fair. Its rules should not artificially favour Amazon’s own retail offers or advantage the offers of retailers using Amazon’s logistics and delivery services. With e-commerce booming, and Amazon being the leading e-commerce platform, a fair and undistorted access to consumers online is important for all sellers.”
The EC is going to being introducing new laws that will be regulating big technology companies even more aggressively than before in order to make sure these companies are limiting its unilateral market power.
Source – Search Engine Land