European Commission says Amazon has breached EU antitrust rules

The European Commission today announced that Amazon has breached EU antitrust rules by distorting competition in online retail markets. The main complaint is that Amazon uses non-public business data of independent sellers who sell on its marketplace, to the benefit of Amazon’s own first party product business, which directly competes with those third party sellers.

“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,” Margrethe Vestager of EC said.

The European Commission has also started a second formal antitrust investigation into the possible preferential treatment of Amazon’s own retail offers and those of marketplace sellers that use Amazon’s logistics and delivery services.

You can read the full complaint from the link below.

Source: EC