2023-09-26 19:06:29
After years of investigations and tensions between political powers and Amazon, the American competition authority (FTC) and 17 states filed a complaint on Tuesday September 26 against the technology giant. They accuse the world number one in online commerce of “illegally maintain its monopoly” thanks to “anti-competitive and unfair strategies”.
“It’s not the size of Amazon that’s to blame”specifies the FTC in a press release, but its “illegal methods which aim to exclude competitors, to prevent them from developing and to prevent alternatives from emerging”.
FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power: /1
— FTC (@FTC) September 26, 2023
According to the federal agency, Amazon, for example, discourages sellers from offering prices lower than its own on products where the Seattle group competes with retailers.
Condition for accessing the Prime service
The authority also criticizes the American giant for making merchants’ eligibility for “Prime” (a subscription which allows consumers to have their delivery quickly) conditional on the use of logistics services. “expensive” from Amazon.
“Amazon is exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself, while driving up prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform and the hundreds of thousands of companies that depend on Amazon » to market their products, asserts the president of the FTC, Lina Khan, quoted in the press release.
“Today’s complaint clearly shows that the FTC has radically strayed from its mission to protect consumers and competition”reacted David Zapolsky, a vice-president of Amazon, in a press release.
“Astounding contempt”
He ensures that the practices called into question by the authority have, on the contrary, “helped drive competition and innovation across the retail industry, and delivered greater choice, lower prices, and faster delivery times to Amazon customers”.
The American group, which achieved $134.4 billion in turnover (more than 125 billion euros), regularly highlights the increase in sales made by merchants on its platform. In 2022, “more than 60% of sales on Amazon came from independent sellers, the majority of whom are small and medium-sized businesses,” the company said last month.
But for many NGOs, SMEs suffer on the contrary from an unfavorable balance of power. “SMEs have been waiting for this moment for a very long time”, commented Tuesday Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which campaigns for local and environmentally friendly consumption.
The platform represents 37.6% of online sales in the United States according to Insider Intelligence, far ahead of supermarkets Walmart (6.8%), Apple (3.5%) and eBay (3.1%).
Criticism of impartiality
Many American elected officials and the Democratic government of Joe Biden have been trying for years to fight against “monopolies” tech giants, with little success.
This summer, the FTC had to suspend its procedure to block the acquisition of Activision Blizzard (video games) by Microsoft, after a series of legal setbacks.
Lina Khan, president of the FTC since 2021, became known when she was still a student, through an article entitled “The Amazon Antitrust Paradox”, published in 2017 in the Yale University Law Review. She considered that the American legislative arsenal was insufficient to fight against the monopolistic practices of groups like Amazon.
In June 2021, the company submitted a complaint to the FTC, accusing its manager of lack of impartiality. But that hasn’t stopped the federal agency from moving forward on several fronts.
Last June, the FTC filed a complaint against Amazon for “trapped consumers” with its Prime subscription, which renews automatically and is ” complicated “ to be terminated.
The institution also attacked the group over respect for data confidentiality. Last May, Amazon agreed to pay more than $30 million to end lawsuits against Ring and Alexa (connected doorbells and speakers, security cameras), two product lines that collect a lot of information about their users.
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