EU Says Amazon Antitrust Offer ‘Not There Yet’

Amazon’s proposals to settle two European Union antitrust investigations “appear relevant” but may need to be altered, the bloc’s antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager has said.

She said the European Commission has started to assess industry feedback on the offer after giving third parties until 9 September to give their opinions.

The probes accuses Amazon of using non-public data from sellers on its marketplace to develop its own offerings and of bias in granting sellers access to its Buy Box and Prime programmes.

‘Not there yet’

“The commitments offered by Amazon appear relevant to address the harm and have the potential to transform Amazon’s business model as a marketplace and retailer,” Vestager said in New York late on Friday.

But she added that “we are not there yet” and that the Commission was assessing feedback “some of which pointed to potential improvements on several points”.

Amazon said in its offer it would stop using data on independent sellers for its competing retail business and would “apply equal treatment to all sellers when ranking their offers for the purposes of the selection of the winner” for the Buy Box, where Amazon highlights sellers of a particular product.

Earlier this month a group of non-governmental organisations urged the Commission to reject Amazon’s offer, saying it was “weak, vague and full of loopholes”.

Third-party data

Instead it should “continue vigorously to pursue its antitrust cases against Amazon, imposing remedies and penalties (on the Commission’s own terms) as necessary”, the organisations said.

Pan-European consumer group BEUC said Amazon should agree not to access the data of third-party sellers and not just to stop using it, as the company proposes.

The company’s proposed second buy box should be tested independently, BEUC said.

The Commission in 2020 said that Amazon was “systematically” using data from third-party sellers on its marketplace to benefit its own retail business.

Google probe

The agency said at the time it had also opened a second antitrust probe into the possible preferential treatment of Amazon’s own retail offers and those of marketplace sellers that use Amazon’s delivery services.

Vestager also said the Commission was in “close contact” with the US Department of Justice over the EU’s preliminary investigation of Google over its activities in the advertising technology market.

She urged Congress to pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which bars tech giants from giving preferential treatment to their own businesses on their web portals, saying the absence of such regulation presented a risk of “regulatory fragmentation”.

The situation points “once again to the ever more important role of cooperation across our jurisdictions, such as our cooperation with the DOJ on Google”, she said.