It was therefore somewhat of an open secret that the CMA was considering what action it should take with respect to these practices. As a result of Brexit, the UK market would no longer be covered by these investigations. Below, we dissect the importance of the UK and German developments.Īs is well known, the European Commission has been investigating Amazon since July 2019 for its collection and use of third-party seller data and it opened an additional investigation in November 2020 relating to the criteria Amazon uses for selection in its “Buy Box” and for eligibility to sell under the “Prime” label. It comes at a time when Amazon is reported to be close to completing an early resolution to the European Commission’s investigations into whether it breached EU competition laws. Amazon was the recipient of not one but two pieces of bad news yesterday, with the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announcing that it has launched an investigation under the Competition Act 1998 into possible abuses of dominance by Amazon, and the German Federal Cartel Office (FCO) designating Amazon as a digital gatekeeper under its new regulatory regime. are vying for lucrative government contracts to provide cloud services to agencies including the Defense Department and the National Security Agency.Some days you just can’t get a break.
#Amazon gets uk antitrust scrutiny on software#
It competes with hundreds of other software companies large and small that offer similar products.Ĭloud computing companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle Corp. It is several times bigger than its next largest rival, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, according to analyst estimates.Īmazon also sells an array of products that run on top of those basic services, such as databases, machine-learning tools and data-warehousing products.
The company argues that her past criticism of the company shows she is biased.ĪWS dominates the market for foundational cloud-computing technology that provides the storage and computing power needed to run applications. The company filed a petition with the agency in June seeking Khan’s recusal from antitrust enforcement decisions against Amazon. The renewed outreach to companies shows the probe is active.Īmazon has provided information to the FTC in response to the agency’s requests, according to a person familiar with the matter.Īmazon and the FTC didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. The agency has pursued inquiries about Amazon’s retail business as well as the cloud division, Bloomberg has reported. The FTC’s investigation of Amazon began during the Trump administration under former chairman Joe Simons. The fear is that Amazon could punish the companies that work with other cloud providers and favor those that it works with exclusively. One issue the FTC could look at is whether Amazon has an incentive to discriminate against software companies that sell their products to clients of AWS, while at the same time competing with Amazon. Khan, a former Columbia Law School professor, rose to prominence in antitrust circles warning about the threats companies like Amazon pose to competition in the digital economy.Īmazon fell almost 1% to $3,381 in New York after Bloomberg reported the news. The focus on Amazon’s $16 billion cloud business, which brings in most of the e-commerce giant’s profit, comes as Khan has set her sights on conduct by the biggest U.S. At least one of the contacts was as recent as the past few weeks, said one of the people. Lina Khan, the head of the agency and a vocal critic of the online retailer, is advancing a probe started several years ago by her predecessor.įTC investigators have contacted companies in the past few months to gather information about competition issues related to Amazon Web Services, said the people, who declined to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the outreach. Federal Trade Commission is pushing forward with antitrust scrutiny of Inc.’s cloud computing business, according to people familiar with the matter.
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