Accusing Amazon of “systematically relying on non-public business data” of sellers to its own advantage, the European Commission on Tuesday opened a formal antitrust investigation into Amazon’s marketplace and retail practices in Germany and France. The Commission’s executive vice-president, Margrethe Vestager, who is in charge of competition policy, announced the probe. We reached the preliminary conclusion that @amazon illegally has abused its dominant position as a marketplace service provider in DE & FR. @amazon may have used sensitive data big scale to compete against smaller retailers. Now for @amazon to respond. @EU_Competition — Margrethe Vestager (@vestager) November 10, 2020 It accused Amazon of leveraging seller data in favour of its own retail business, which competes directly with these sellers. This allowed Amazon to “avoid normal risks of retail competition and to leverage its dominance in the market for the provision of marketplace services in France and Germany — the biggest markets for Amazon in the EU”. The Commission said its preliminary findings, a result of an investigation kicked off in July 2019, show that Amazon’s retail employees have access to “very large quantities of non-public seller data”. This data flows directly into Amazon’s automated systems, which aggregates these data and uses them to "calibrate Amazon's retail offers and strategic business decisions to the detriment of the other marketplace sellers". Amazon has access to non-public business data of third-party sellers such as number of orders shipped, the seller's revenues, number of visits to sellers' offers, shipping-related data, sellers' past performance, and other…
