EU Regulators Eye Antitrust Probe Of Amazon

Europe’s antitrust regulators have opened a preliminary probe of Amazon.com to see whether the e-commerce giant has stifled smaller competitors who sell clothing, toys and other goods through its website, marking the region’s latest inquiry into the business practices of a U.S. tech giant.

The concern at hand is whether Amazon’s use of sales data from third-party merchants gives it a leg up in selling its own products, said Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s competition chief, on Wednesday. More than half of Amazon’s sales now come from third-party merchants that do business on the company’s site, as the retailer aggressively recruits small and medium-size sellers to join its marketplace. (Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)

“The question here is about the data,” Vestager said at a news conference. “If you as Amazon get the data from the smaller merchants that you host … do you then also use this data to do your own calculations on what is the new big thing? What is it that people want? What kind of offers do they like to receive? What makes them buy things?”

Amazon declined to comment.

Vestager added that the EU has not formally opened a case but is in the process of gathering information from third-party sellers.

“It is very early days in this antitrust investigation into Amazon’s business practices,” she said. “We are trying to make sure that we sort of get the full picture.”

Shares of Amazon have more than doubled in the past year, but its stock fell more than 1 percent following the news Wednesday.