Amazon under EU antitrust fire over use of merchant data
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Amazon became the target of an antitrust investigation by the European Union on Wednesday over its use of merchants’ data, underlining the increasing regulatory scrutiny about how tech companies exploit customers’ information.
US tech giants Amazon, Google and Facebook have been in the regulatory spotlight as antitrust enforcers examine how they use data to boost their market power. Some US politicians and even one of Facebook’s cofounders have called for them to be broken up.
The European Commission has been seeking feedback from retailers and manufacturers since September into Amazon’s dual role as a marketplace for merchants and acting as a competitor following complaints from traders about Amazon’s practices.
The commission said its investigation would focus on Amazon’s standard agreements with marketplace sellers and its use of data in choosing winners of the “buy box,” which allows consumers to add items from a specific retailer directly to their shopping carts.
European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who can fine companies up to 10% of their global turnover, said the issue was crucial as more and more Europeans shop online.
“E-commerce has boosted retail competition and brought more choice and better prices,” she said. “We need to ensure that large online platforms don’t eliminate these benefits through anti-competitive behavior.”
Amazon said it would cooperate fully with the EU investigation. The company reached a deal with Germany’s antitrust authority on Wednesday to overhaul its terms of service for third-party merchants.
Under its terms of service for Europe set out on its website, merchants grant Amazon “royalty-free” rights to use in a range of ways their materials, such as technology, trademarks, content and product information.
The EU probe has some parallels to the commission’s investigation of Google for giving illegal advantage in search results to its own comparison shopping service, said Ian Giles, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright.
“There have been concerns around the world that competition authorities have failed to appreciate the market power that comes from ownership of data,” he said.
In Amazon’s case, he said the commission needed to show “the standard agreements with retailers were anti-competitive in somehow allowing Amazon to use the data to manipulate market outcomes, or that Amazon had in some way abused its dominance.”
Politico reported last week the EU would start a probe.
The commission had been struggling to define the market in which Amazon operates to identify where the competitive harm could have been, sources said.
They said the issue was whether to look at Amazon in the overall retail market or in its own niche.
This would not be Amazon’s first run-in with the commission. Two years ago, it was told to pay back taxes of about 250 million euros to Luxembourg because of illegal tax benefits. That same year, it settled with the regulator over its distribution deals with e-book publishers in Europe.