Italy’s competition authority announced on Tuesday, April 16, it will begin a preliminary investigation into whether Amazon abused its dominance in e-Commerce and logistics services, reported Reuters. The competition watchdog claimed Amazon offered certain benefits to third-party sellers only if they signed up to logistical services offered by the US online retail giant. “We are […]
Jeff Bezos knows there are powerful Washington politicians who consider his digital commerce platform a monopoly and so wants them to know that Amazon is getting trounced by third-party sellers on its platform, reported GeekWire. According to the Washington Post, that is the takeaway from the Amazon CEO and founder’s new letter to shareholders, released […]
According to a report by CNBC, the EU aims to announce whether Amazon’s data practices will be investigated further in the coming months, the institution’s competition chief said. In September, Margrethe Vestager, the head of competition policy in Europe, opened a preliminary probe into Amazon’s use of data on its third-party merchants. The idea was […]
If you shop online, there’s a good chance the price you pay for stuff is determined by a computer algorithm, reported the Wall Street Journal. As of 2015, over one third of the 1,600 best-selling items sold on Amazon came from sellers who used algorithms to set their price. Emilio Calvano, an economist at the […]
The European Commission is nearing a decision on its investigation into Amazon, with the European Union competition chief saying over the weekend that the Commission has gathered a lot of information on the eCommerce company. According to a report in Seeking Alpha, EU Competition Chief Margrethe Vestager said the Commission gathered “a lot of data” […]
Google, Amazon, and Facebook spent record amounts to influence the US government in 2018. They poured a combined $48 million into lobbying last year, up 13 percent from 2017, according to Bloomberg. Amazon.com reported spending $3.7 million in the fourth quarter, bringing its total to $14.2 million for the year, more than the record $12.8 […]
According to a report From Bloomberg, Amazon is combining some offerings in a way similar to Google and could face sanctions in order to safeguard competition rules, the chairman of Germany’s Monopolies Commission Achim Wambach told Welt am Sonntag in an interview. “One could think in the direction of an unbundling on a product level […]
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Wednesday, March 20, quizzed a Google executive over the firm’s data protection and other procedural protocols as the government sets about clamping down on regulations for global IT companies operating here. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) will also question Facebook on Friday, March 22, to […]
Amazon, worried that it could run afoul of antitrust laws, will stop preventing third-party sellers from hawking their products on other websites for a lower price. According to a report in CNN, Amazon confirmed that the new policy kicked off this week, but declined to comment further. CNN reported that Senator Richard Blumenthal had reached […]
Senator Elizabeth Warren has pledged that, if elected president next year, she will aim to break up the big tech companies Amazon, Facebook, and Google because they have too much control over Americans’ lives, reported the New York Times. In her plan to rein in the influence of tech giants, Warren proposes legislation targeting companies […]